मुंबई के पशिचमी तट की जैव विविधता के अध्यन व्दारा यहाँ की पर्यवरणीय एवं सामाजिक योजनाओं का सफल निर्धारण

कृपया पूरा लेखा पढ

Diabetes-induced alterations in urothelium function:Enhanced ATP release and nerve-evoked contractions in the streptozotocin rat bladder

Up to 80% of patients with diabetes mellitus develop lower urinary tract complications, most commonly diabetic bladder dysfunction (DBD). The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of diabetes on the function of the inner bladder lining (urothelium). Bladder compliance and intraluminal release of urothelial mediators, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and acetylcholine (ACh) in response to distension were investigated in whole bladders isolated from 2‐ and 12‐week streptozotocin (STZ)‐diabetic rats. Intact and urothelium‐denuded bladder strips were used to assess the influence of the urothelium on bladder contractility. Intraluminal ATP release was significantly enhanced at 2 weeks of diabetes, although not at 12 weeks. In contrast, intraluminal ACh release was unaltered by diabetes. Bladder compliance was also significantly enhanced at both 2 and 12 weeks of diabetes, with greatly reduced intravesical pressures in response to distension. Nerve‐evoked contractions of bladder strips were significantly greater at 2 weeks of diabetes. When the urothelium was absent, nerve‐evoked contractions were reduced, but contractions remained significantly elevated at lower frequencies of stimulation (<5 Hz) in diabetics. Interestingly, although relaxations of bladder strips to isoprenaline were unaltered by diabetes, removal of the urothelium unmasked significantly enhanced relaxations in strips from 2‐ and 12‐week diabetic animals. In conclusion, diabetes alters urothelial function. Enhanced urothelial ATP release may be involved in the hypercontractility observed at early time points of diabetes. These alterations are time‐dependent and may contribute to the mechanisms at play during the development of diabetic bladder dysfunction.Full Tex

Otter, Felix: Grundkurs Sanskrit: Eine Einführung in die Sprache der altindischen Erzählliteratur. Bremen: Hempen Verlag, 2017, 324 S., ISBN 978-3-944312-44-6: Rezension

It gave me pleasure to read the textbook Grundkurs Sanskrit (Basic course in Sanskrit), an introduction to the basic grammar of the language of ancient Indian narrative literature. Several books have been written in the last decade for learning Sanskrit, and this book by Felix Otter increases the stock of options for learning it through German

Improving the Accuracy of CFD Method for Windscreen Deicing

During winter, ice formed on the windscreen has to be removed before driving the vehicle. It is not safe to drive the vehicle without clear visibility on the windscreen. The defroster system in passenger cars melts ice on the windscreen. During the development of defroster systems, car manufacturers conduct physical tests to measure their performance. The performance of various design models are predicted through physical tests which consumes large amount of time. At Volvo Cars, Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) is used extensively to analyse the performance of various attributes of the car which reduces substantial amount of development time. The objective of the master thesis is to improve the accuracy of the current CFD method in predicting the melting pattern of ice over the windscreen. The Volvo V40 model is used to analyse the performance of the defroster models. The Volvo V40 CAD model is surface meshed using ANSA meshing software which is then followed by generating the volume mesh using Harpoon meshing software. Boundary layers are generated at the cabin surface interface with the windscreen. In addition to it, three layers of windscreen and ice are modelled as prism layers using Fluentmesh to accurately predict the temperature and melting pattern at the external boundary of ice. Steady state defroster ow is analysed to predict that the ow coming out from the defroster nozzles is uniformly distributed over the windscreen. The steady state ow simulation are carried out using realizable k and k SST turbulence model for modeling the turbulent ow in the defroster domain. It is found that the realizable k turbulence model performed better than the k ! SST turbulence model in solving the defroster ow field. Having known the distribution of the defroster ow, transient thermal analysis is performed by use of Solidification and Melting model and modified various boundary conditions. By varying the thermal properties of air from constant to a polynomial function of temperature and followed by modifying the boundary conditions of certain walls like A-pillar, instrument panel and front doors from adiabatic to temperature thermal boundary condition (using a transient temperature profile) there is some amount of improvement in the performance of the transient CFD model. However, consideration of radiation effect on certain walls did not have any in uence in the transient simulation results. Moreover the selection of unsteady first order discretization scheme predicted the melting of ice quicker occur over the windscreen than unsteady second order scheme. The melting pattern obtained using unsteady first order scheme correlates better to the physical test results. Finally with the consideration of heat energy supplied across the heater instead of specifying the transient temperature profile at the inlet of HVAC unit, accuracy of the transient model improved significantly. It is believed that by taking into account source terms like gravitational force, buoyancy force in the solidification and melting model in addition to the implementation of sliding of partially melted ice occur over the windscreen can lead to further improvement in the performance of transient CFD models

Elucidating the Cellular Physiology Associated with the Herbicide (Glyphosate) Resistance and Tolerance in Agricultural Weeds Using Metabolomics Approach

Current management practices overemphasizes on herbicides to manage weeds in crop production systems. However, indiscriminate use of herbicides to manage weeds has resulted in the development of resistance in several weed biotypes. Over-application on glyphosate to manage weeds in cropping system that uses RoundUp® Ready™ trait has resulted in the dominance of glyphosate resistant weeds across cropping systems. Glyphosate resistance is an important, economically unviable and rapidly escalating problem across agricultural production systems. To combat herbicide resistance, current recommendations advocate for changes in chemical and cultural practices of weed control, including rotation of herbicide regimen with herbicides with alternate modes of action, and formulation of cultural practices that would penalize the expression of resistance. Some of the bottlenecks in practicing these approaches are the current lack of knowledge about the weed cellular physiology that ensues resistance expression, the potential metabolic cost associated with this resistance expression, and the occurrence of compensatory pathways that could defray the cost of resistance expression. Adopting an alternate herbicide regimen without an understanding of the cellular physiology of resistance expression would result in the development of herbicide cross resistance in weeds, which would further aggravate the problem. To bridge this knowledge-gap, in this studies, metabolomics approach and complementary biochemical analyses were used to track the changes in cellular metabolism in weed species and biotypes that are resistant and naturally tolerant to glyphosate. In Ipomoea lacunosa, non-targeted metabolic profiling captured the differences in metabolic pool levels in two biotypes (WAS and QUI) with contrasting glyphosate tolerance (GR50 = 151 g ae ha-1 and 59 g ae ha-1). Metabolic profiling followed by pathway topological analysis captured innate metabolic differences (22 significantly different metabolites) between WAS and QUI biotypes. Despite the glyphosate dose being half the GR50 rate, shikimic acid accumulation was observed in both the biotypes. However, regardless of EPSPS inhibition, no changes in aromatic amino abundance was observed in the QUI biotype and WAS biotype, indicating their tolerance to the glyphosate. The results from this study implies that though I. lacunosa is tolerant to glyphosate, glyphosate exposure induces cellular metabolic perturbations. The varying tolerance to glyphosate could thus be due to physiological and metabolic adaptations between the different biotypes. Following through, metabolite and biochemical profiling of a susceptible (S) and resistant (R) biotype of Amaranthus palmeri identified physiological perturbations induced by glyphosate in both the biotypes at 8 and 80 hours after treatment (HAT). Compared to the S-biotype, the R-biotype had a 17 fold resistance to the normal field recommended rate of glyphosate. At 8HAT, shikimic acid accumulation in both S- and R-biotypes in response to glyphosate application indicated that the R-biotype was equally susceptible to glyphosate toxicity. The metabolite pool of glyphosate-treated R-biotype was similar to that of the water-treated (control) S and R-biotype, indicating physiological recovery at 80 HAT. A key finding from this study is that despite being resistant to glyphosate, Palmer amaranth biotypes initially sustained metabolic perturbation from glyphosate. However, what differentiates them from the susceptible biotypes is their ability to recover from the glyphosate induced metabolic disruptions. In response to glyphosate, glyphosate-treated R-biotype had lower reactive oxygen species (ROS) damage, higher ROS scavenging activity, and higher levels of secondary compounds of the shikimate pathway, leading to the finding that elevated anti-oxidant mechanisms in A. palmeri complements the resistance conferred due to increased EPSPS copy number. Furthermore, metabolite dynamics in response to glyphosate application studied using stable isotope resolved metabolomics revealed that despite glyphosate toxicity induced decrease in soluble proteins, a proportional increase in both 14N and 15N amino acids was observed in the susceptible plants. This indicates that following glyphosate treatment, a potential increase in de novo amino acid synthesis, coupled with a lower protein synthesis, and higher protein catabolism is observed in the S-biotype. In contrast, the R-biotype, though affected by glyphosate initially, had higher de novo amino acid synthesis without significant disruptions. Moreover, it is to be noted that although the initial assimilation of inorganic nitrogen to organic forms is less affected in the S-biotype than the R-biotype by glyphosate, amino acid biosynthesis downstream of glutamine is disproportionately disrupted. It is thus concluded that the herbicide-induced amino acid abundance in the S-biotype is contributed to by both protein catabolism, and de novo synthesis of amino acids such as glutamine and asparagine. Due to variability in the genetic makeup of populations, each biotype would exhibit different physiological manifestations when exposed to the same rate of glyphosate. Biochemical and metabolic profiling of five different Palmer amaranth biotypes indicated that both the S- and R-biotypes had comparable innate phytochemical profile and similar abundance in flavonoids and phenolic. However, compared to the S-biotypes, the R-biotypes had innately higher anti-oxidant capacity, and the antioxidant capacity was observed to correlate with the GR50 such that antioxidant capacity increased with increasing GR50. Upon treatment with glyphosate, there were significant alterations in the metabolic pool levels across all biotypes. After glyphosate treatment, the content of total phenolic and flavonoids decrease in S-biotypes, whereas the abundance of these metabolites either remained the same, or increased in the R-biotypes. These results indicate that antioxidant capacity is a complementary function aiding in conferring glyphosate resistance and the phytochemistry and the antioxidant capacity is partly induced after glyphosate application, rather than being constitutively expressed. Overall, these study demonstrates that, across biotypes and species, irrespective of their degree of resistance/tolerance, glyphosate not only perturbs shikimate pathway, but also a multitude of other metabolic pathways that are independent of shikimate pathway (secondary toxic effects) as early as eight hours after treatment. While in the susceptible biotypes these metabolic perturbations result in rapid cellular damage, these metabolic perturbations fail to translate to cellular damage in the resistant biotypes. The results indicate that the resistance of A. palmeri biotypes that were used in these studies partially stems from their ability to rapidly induce the production of phenylpropanoids soon after the glyphosate application. This induction of phytochemicals could quench the reactive molecules that are initially produced during the secondary metabolic perturbations, and would thus complement the glyphosate resistance in Amaranthus biotypes conferred by EPSPS gene amplification

Green Finance: The Future of Sustainable Banking in India

India is now in a situation where it has to accept the challenges from the international forum to improve its green infrastructure and attain its sustainable developments goals and climatic challenges like global warming, its huge population and huge green depletion. If the country has to survive it has to adopt Green finance. Green finance or climate finance is a component where it has to change it’s focus and behaviour from traditional form of financing to more environment friendly financing. It has to build a strategy through green finance to achieve its sustainable development goals. Indian and international financial agencies, corporates need to be encouraged to refocus on the aspect of green finance. There has been lot of promises and challenges in this front. This study is an effort to understand the situation where India stands and the go ahead as far as green finance and to manage its sustainable development goals. This study is of descriptive in nature and is based on secondary data derived from various international and national agency reports, which includes report from Government of India

Impact of GDP volatility on current account balances

This paper empirically investigates the impact of GDP volatility on current account balances for a large sample of developed and developing countries. We extend the standard set of short- and long-term determinants of current accounts to include GDP volatility computed from the annual growth rate of GDP. It turns out that for low income countries the impact of GDP volatility on their current account balances is negative, whereas the reverse is true for high income countries. The intertemporal approach to the balance of payments followed in this paper suggests that a diverse response of current account balances to GDP volatility can be due to the different degree of shock persistence in developed and developing countries.current account, savings, investment, volatility

Glyphosate Application Causes Physiological Perturbations in Amino Acid Profiles of Palmer amaranth- A Study of Susceptible and Resistant Biotypes of Amaranthus palmeri

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It is used to control perennial grasses and weeds having broad leaves. Glyphosate works by inhibiting the plant specific enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phospate synthase that catalyzes the conversion of shikimic acid to chorismate, which serves as the precursor to production of aromatic amino acids, namely tyrosine, phenylalanine and tryptophan