Abiotic stresses hamper plant growth and productivity. Climate change and agricultural malpractices like excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides have aggravated the effects of abiotic stresses on crop productivity and degraded the ecosystem. There is an urgent need for environment-friendly management techniques such as the use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) for enhancing crop productivity. AMF are commonly known as bio-fertilizers. Moreover, it is widely believed that the inoculation of AMF provides tolerance to host plants against various stressful situations like heat, salinity, drought, metals, and extreme temperatures. AMF may both assist host plants in the up-regulation of tolerance mechanisms and prevent the down-regulation of key metabolic pathways. AMF, being natural root symbionts, provide essential plant inorganic nutrients to host plants, thereby improving growth and yield under unstressed and stressed regimes. The role of AMF as a bio-fertilizer can potentially strengthen plants’ adaptability to changing environment. Thus, further research focusing on the AMF-mediated promotion of crop quality and productivity is needed. The present review provides a comprehensive up-to-date knowledge on AMF and their influence on host plants at various growth stages, their advantages and applications, and consequently the importance of the relationships of different plant nutrients with AMF.

The prediction of protein sub-cellular localization is an important step toward elucidating protein function. For each query protein sequence, LocTree2 applies machine learning (profile kernel SVM) to predict the native sub-cellular localization in 18 classes for eukaryotes, in six for bacteria and in three for archaea. The method outputs a score that reflects the reliability of each prediction. LocTree2 has performed on par with or better than any other state-of-the-art method. Here, we report the availability of LocTree3 as a public web server. The server includes the machine learning-based LocTree2 and improves over it through the addition of homology-based inference. Assessed on sequence-unique data, LocTree3 reached an 18-state accuracy Q18 = 80 ± 3% for eukaryotes and a six-state accuracy Q6 = 89 ± 4% for bacteria. The server accepts submissions ranging from single protein sequences to entire proteomes. Response time of the unloaded server is about 90 s for a 300-residue eukaryotic protein and a few hours for an entire eukaryotic proteome not considering the generation of the alignments. For over 1000 entirely sequenced organisms, the predictions are directly available as downloads. The web server is available at http://www.rostlab.org/services/loctree3.

Human activity recognition (HAR) techniques are playing a significant role in monitoring the daily activities of human life such as elderly care, investigation activities, healthcare, sports, and smart homes. Smartphones incorporated with varieties of motion sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes are widely used inertial sensors that can identify different physical conditions of human. In recent research, many works have been done regarding human activity recognition. Sensor data of smartphone produces high dimensional feature vectors for identifying human activities. However, all the vectors are not contributing equally for identification process. Including all feature vectors create a phenomenon known as ‘curse of dimensionality’. This research has proposed a hybrid method feature selection process, which includes a filter and wrapper method. The process uses a sequential floating forward search (SFFS) to extract desired features for better activity recognition. Features are then fed to a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) to create nonlinear classifiers by adopting the kernel trick for training and testing purpose. We validated our model with a benchmark dataset. Our proposed system works efficiently with limited hardware resource and provides satisfactory activity identification.

No abstract

No abstract

BACKGROUND: Berries indigenously grown in Asia are known for their diversified nutritional and health promoting properties. Establishing a link between berry consumption and their classical uses in health management however requires detailed research in exploring varied biochemical factors and their therapeutic role in averting risks of chronic disorders. OBJECTIVE: The present study was aimed at evaluating anti-inflammatory and anticancer responses of fruit extracts of Grewia asiatica locally known as Phalsa. METHODS: Dichloromethane, methanol and 50% hydro-methanolic fractions of fruit were evaluated for polyphenols characterization, quantification and antioxidant assays. Anti-inflammatory and anti-nociceptive responses of fruit extracts were evaluated in rats and mice models, respectively, and cytotoxic activities were measured against MCF-7, HeLa, HEp-2, NCI-H522, HEK-293 cancer cell cultures. RESULTS: Phenolics quantification and biological study data suggested 50% hydro-methanolic extracts as maximum carrier of flavonoids (7.92 mgQE/g), anthocyanins (8.1 mg/Kg) and tannins (187.2 mgGAE/g) that significantly (p < 0.05)resulted in higher oxidation inhibition (IC50 41.1 ug/ml), paw edema inhibition (68-74%) and pain mediation in neurogenic phase(31-62%) when administrated at the rate of 400 mg/kg b.w. Maximum cytotoxic activity of G. asiatica (50% hydromethanolic extracts) was observed against MCF-7 (IC50 34.9 ug/mL), HEp-2 (IC50 80.4 ug/mL) and NCI-H522 (IC50 73 ug/mL) cancer cell lines. LC-ESI-MS/MS characterization of hydro-alcoholic fractions bearing potent biological activities revealed Gallic acid, Ellagic acid, Quinic acid, Calycosin, Vidalenolone, Quercetin, Myricetin, Liquitrigenin and 6-aldehydo-isoophiopogonone. Human equivalent doses of the extracts calculated on the basis of total phenolic contents for anti-inflammatory and nociceptive assays were in range between 6.2-15.8 mg/kg b.w., and 3.1-7.9 mg/kg b.w., respectively.

No abstract

No abstract