Christ University

About: Christ University is a education organization based out in Bengaluru, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Convection. The organization has 2267 authors who have published 2715 publications receiving 14575 citations. The organization is also known as: Christ College & Christ University.

Biotic elicitors: a boon for the in-vitro production of plant secondary metabolites

Abstract: Plant secondary metabolites are produced naturally in the plant system as a defense mechanism to combat environmental stress factors. These metabolites are extensively used in food, cosmetics, agrochemicals and pharmaceutical sectors. With the applications of plant tissue culture, any particular organ which is the major site for secondary metabolite production can be targeted and cultured. Recently, a new strategy to increase the metabolite production in plants has been employed with the use of elicitors. These elicitors are the chemical substances that trigger the biosynthetic pathways by activating certain transcriptional factors and upregulating the genes. Hence the secondary metabolite production increases in the plant system due to the stress developed by the introduction of the elicitors. Generally, elicitors may be abiotically derived from non-living sources or biotically derived from the living sources. In the present review, the mechanism of biotic elicitation and the applications of biotic elicitors like bacterial, fungal, algal elicitors and other polysaccharides extracted from them has been discussed extensively. It has been noted that the addition of bacterial elicitors like Rhizobium rhizogenes showed a 94% increase in genistein production while Escherichia coli showed a 9.1-fold increase in diosgenin production. Similarly, fungal elicitors like Aspergillus niger increased thiophene production by 85% and a 26-fold increase in sanguinarine production was seen when the cultures were treated with Botrytis sps. Algal extracts like Haematococcus pluvialis increased the betalain production by 2.28 folds while Botryococcus braunii elicited Vanillin, Vanillylamine and Capsaicin by 3-fold, 6-fold and 2.3-fold respectively.

Investigating the in-flight performance of the UVIT payload on AstroSat

Abstract: We have studied the performance of the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope payload on AstroSat and derived a calibration of the FUV and NUV instruments on board. We find that the sensitivity of both the FUV and NUV channels is as expected from ground calibrations, with the FUV effective area about 35% and the NUV effective area about the same as that of GALEX. The point spread function of the instrument is on the order of 1.2-1.6 arcsec. We have found that pixel-to-pixel variations in the sensitivity are less than 10% with spacecraft motion compensating for most of the flat-field variations. We derived a distortion correction but recommend that it be applied post-processing as part of an astrometric solution.