Water scarcity and salinity are major challenges facing agriculture today, which can be addressed by engineering plants to grow in the boundless seawater. Understanding the mangrove plants at the molecular level will be necessary for developing such highly salt-tolerant agricultural crops. With this objective, we sequenced the genome of a salt-secreting and extraordinarily salt-tolerant mangrove species, Avicennia marina, that grows optimally in 75% seawater and tolerates >250% seawater. Our reference-grade ~457 Mb genome contains 31 scaffolds corresponding to its chromosomes. We identified 31,477 protein-coding genes and a salinome consisting of 3246 salinity-responsive genes and homologs of 614 experimentally validated salinity tolerance genes. The salinome provides a strong foundation to understand the molecular mechanisms of salinity tolerance in plants and breeding crops suitable for seawater farming.

Ocimum gratissimum L. is an important medicinal species with several therapeutic applications. It is used in traditional medicine as a single drug and in formulations. We generated the complete chloroplast genome sequence of O. gratissimum by using Illumina paired-end sequencing data. The O. gratissimum chloroplast genome is 152,469 bp in length, containing a large single copy (LSC) region of 83,614 bp and a small single copy region (SSC) of 17,607 bp, separated by a pair of inverted repeats (IRs) of 25,624 bp. The genome contains 138 unique genes, including 85 protein-coding, 45 tRNA, and eight rRNA genes. Among them, six genes have one intron each, and two genes contain two introns. The overall GC content of the chloroplast genome is 37.8%, while the corresponding values of LSC, SSC, and IR regions are 35.6%, 31.7%, and 43.2%, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis with the complete chloroplast genomes of other related species revealed that O. gratissimum is fully resolved in a clade with other Ocimum species classified to the family Lamiaceae.

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The environmental conditions on planet earth are extremely diverse, with enormous variations in pressure, pH, temperature and salt concentration. All these environments are inhabited by living organisms, particularly microorganisms which have adapted to the different extremes of environments. Among various extreme environments, low temperature is very common both in natural and man-made environments. Microorganisms play a significant role for maintaining the ecological balance in any ecosystem. During the long journey of evolution, they have undergone changes at different levels for adaptation and thus show huge genetic diversity for exploration. Extremely low temperature environments are generally inhabited by the cold adapted microorganisms which have the ability to grow and survive under harsh conditions. These cold adapted microorganisms, known as cold loving (psychrophiles) and cold tolerant (psychrotrophs).The North Western Himalayan region that extends over the states of Jammu Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in India presents a virgin opportunity for exploration and characterization of psychrophilic and psychrotolerant microorganisms, due to the unique ecological niche of the region that includes glaciers, alpine and sub alpine regions. Soil of such regions is mountaineous that is deficient in various materials. Phosphorus is second to nitrogen as a mineral nutrient required by plants and microorganisms, its major physiological role being in certain essential steps, the accumulation and release of energy during cellular metabolism. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plants, lack of which limits plant growth. It is least soluble in the soil. This chapter deals with the diversity of cold tolerant

DDT is one of the most persistent pesticides among all the different types of organo-chlorine pesticides used. Among all the degradation methods, bacterial degradation of DDT is most effective. The present study was conducted to isolate different bacteria present in waste samples which have the ability to degrade DDT present in the soil in the minimum possible period of time and to observe the effect of different physical and chemical properties of the soil samples. Many pesticide degrading bacteria were isolated and identified through cultural, biochemical tests and further identified by 16S RNA sequencing method. The most potent strain DDT 1 growth in mineral salt medium supplemented with DDT as the only source of carbon (5-100 PPM) and was monitored at an optical density of 600 nm. The growth parameters at different physio-chemical conditions were further optimized. The result showed that Enterobacter cloacae had maximum growth in 15 days. FTIR analysis of the residual DDT after 15 days incubation showed that Enterobacter cloacae was able to degrade pesticide into its further metabolites of DDD, DDE, DDNU and other components can be used for biodegradation of DDT present in contaminated soil and water ecosystems.

The complete chloroplast genome (cp) of Ocimum tenuiflorum L. subtype Krishna Tulsi was sequenced and assembled using Illumina paired-end sequencing data. The cp genome is 151,758 bp in length, including a large single copy (LSC) region of 82,794 bp, a small single-copy region (SSC) of 17,592 bp, and a pair of inverted repeated (IR) region of 25,686 bp. The cp genome of Krishna Tulsi encodes 129 genes, including 90 protein-coding, 31 transfer RNA (tRNA), and eight ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. While the overall GC content was 37.9%, it is 36.0%, 31.8%, and 43.1% in the LSC, SSC, and IR regions, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis based on chloroplast genome sequences of 17 species from Lamiaceae revealed that O. tenuiflorum subtype Krishna Tulsi is clustered with other Ocimum species, and forms a clade with genera from family Lamiaceae.

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With the fast development of digital exchange of data in an electronic way, data and information security are becoming more important in both transmission and data storage. Cryptography is used as a solution which plays an important role in data and information security systems against malicious attacks. The encryption technique is used to provide confidentiality to the data during transmission because security threats are more on data during transmission than data at rest. One can also use encryption to secure user’s data at data storage (i.e., data at rest). But an encryption algorithm consumes a more amount of computing resources such as processing power, memory and computation time. Obfuscation technique is a very lightweight technique that comes into a picture to protect the data at storage from malicious attacks. There are many obfuscation techniques are available to ensure the confidentiality of the data. In this paper, an obfuscation technique has been proposed and implemented which uses a 128-bit key to improve the security of the data. The experimental results show that the time taken for obfuscation and de-obfuscation is less and also from the security point of view it provides high avalanche effect