Showing papers by "Jawaharlal Nehru University published in 2019"

Pharmaceuticals of Emerging Concern in Aquatic Systems: Chemistry, Occurrence, Effects, and Removal Methods.

Abstract: In the last few decades, pharmaceuticals, credited with saving millions of lives, have emerged as a new class of environmental contaminant. These compounds can have both chronic and acute harmful effects on natural flora and fauna. The presence of pharmaceutical contaminants in ground waters, surface waters (lakes, rivers, and streams), sea water, wastewater treatment plants (influents and effluents), soils, and sludges has been well doccumented. A range of methods including oxidation, photolysis, UV-degradation, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, and adsorption has been used for their remediation from aqueous systems. Many methods have been commercially limited by toxic sludge generation, incomplete removal, high capital and operating costs, and the need for skilled operating and maintenance personnel. Adsorption technologies are a low-cost alternative, easily used in developing countries where there is a dearth of advanced technologies, skilled personnel, and available capital, and adsorption appears to be the most broadly feasible pharmaceutical removal method. Adsorption remediation methods are easily integrated with wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Herein, we have reviewed the literature (1990-2018) illustrating the rising environmental pharmaceutical contamination concerns as well as remediation efforts emphasizing adsorption.

Gut microbiome and type 2 diabetes: where we are and where to go?

Abstract: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2D) is a highly prevalent metabolic disorder characterized by an imbalance in blood glucose level, altered lipid profile and high blood pressure. Genetic constituents, high-fat and high-energy dietary habits, and a sedentary lifestyle are three major factors that contribute to high risk of T2D. Several studies have reported gut microbiome dysbiosis as a factor in rapid progression of insulin resistance in T2D that accounts for about 90% of all diabetes cases worldwide. The gut microbiome dysbiosis may reshape intestinal barrier functions and host metabolic and signaling pathways, which are directly or indirectly related to the insulin resistance in T2D. Thousands of the metabolites derived from microbes interact with the epithelial, hepatic and cardiac cell receptors that modulate host physiology. Xenobiotics including dietary components, antibiotics and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs strongly affect the gut microbial composition and can promote dysbiosis. Any change in the gut microbiota can shift the host metabolism towards increased energy harvest during diabetes and obesity. However, the exact mechanisms behind the dynamics of gut microbes and their impact on host metabolism at the molecular level are yet to be deciphered. We reviewed the published literature for better understanding of the dynamics of gut microbiota, factors that potentially induce gut microbiome dysbiosis and their relation to the progression of T2D. Special emphasis was also given to understand the gut microbiome induced breaching of intestinal barriers and/or tight junctions and their relation to insulin resistance.

Disaster and its impact on mental health: A narrative review.

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to understand the linkages between disaster and its impact on mental health. To fulfil this objective, an attempt has been made to examine the existing qualitative literature on disaster and mental health. In this paper, disaster and mental health as a concept has been used in a holistic sense. Based on the review of literature, the following broad themes have been identified: natural disaster and its impact on mental health, man-made disaster and its effect on mental health, effects of industrial disaster on mental health. It examines the post-disaster behavioural and psychological symptoms associated with an impairment in functioning. By this review, various protective factors, including resilience and other coping strategies which amplified the individual's capacity while encountering negative situations, have been identified. The effectiveness of post-disaster intervention techniques is also highlighted. Better preparedness and community empowerment can improve the condition of the vulnerable population affected by the disaster. Thus, efforts should be given for holistic rehabilitation of the affected population.

A Review of High Impact Weather for Aviation Meteorology

Abstract: This review paper summarizes current knowledge available for aviation operations related to meteorology and provides suggestions for necessary improvements in the measurement and prediction of weather-related parameters, new physical methods for numerical weather predictions (NWP), and next-generation integrated systems. Severe weather can disrupt aviation operations on the ground or in-flight. The most important parameters related to aviation meteorology are wind and turbulence, fog visibility, aerosol/ash loading, ceiling, rain and snow amount and rates, icing, ice microphysical parameters, convection and precipitation intensity, microbursts, hail, and lightning. Measurements of these parameters are functions of sensor response times and measurement thresholds in extreme weather conditions. In addition to these, airport environments can also play an important role leading to intensification of extreme weather conditions or high impact weather events, e.g., anthropogenic ice fog. To observe meteorological parameters, new remote sensing platforms, namely wind LIDAR, sodars, radars, and geostationary satellites, and in situ instruments at the surface and in the atmosphere, as well as aircraft and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles mounted sensors, are becoming more common. At smaller time and space scales (e.g., < 1 km), meteorological forecasts from NWP models need to be continuously improved for accurate physical parameterizations. Aviation weather forecasts also need to be developed to provide detailed information that represents both deterministic and statistical approaches. In this review, we present available resources and issues for aviation meteorology and evaluate them for required improvements related to measurements, nowcasting, forecasting, and climate change, and emphasize future challenges.

Neutrino Non-Standard Interactions: A Status Report

Abstract: Author(s): Dev, Bhupal; Babu, KS; Denton, Peter; Machado, Pedro; Arguelles, Carlos A; Barrow, Joshua L; Chatterjee, Sabya Sachi; Chen, Mu-Chun; de Gouvea, Andre; Dutta, Bhaskar; Goncalves, Dorival; Han, Tao; Hostert, Matheus; Jana, Sudip; Kelly, Kevin J; Li, Shirley Weishi; Martinez-Soler, Ivan; Mehta, Poonam; Mocioiu, Irina; Perez-Gonzalez, Yuber F; Salvado, Jordi; Shoemaker, Ian; Tammaro, Michele; Thapa, Anil; Turner, Jessica; Xu, Xun-Jie | Abstract: This report summarizes the present status of neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI). After a brief overview, several aspects of NSIs are discussed, including connection to neutrino mass models, model-building and phenomenology of large NSI with both light and heavy mediators, NSI phenomenology in both short- and long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments, neutrino cross-sections, complementarity of NSI with other low- and high-energy experiments, fits with neutrino oscillation and scattering data, DUNE sensitivity to NSI, effective field theory of NSI, as well as the relevance of NSI to dark matter and cosmology. We also discuss the open questions and interesting future directions that can be pursued by the community at large. This report is based on talks and discussions during the Neutrino Theory Network NSI workshop held at Washington University in St.~Louis from May 29-31, 2019

Fe3O4 Nanoparticles Dispersed on Douglas Fir Biochar for Phosphate Sorption

Abstract: Surface area, particle aggregation, pressure drop in columns, nanotoxicity, and commercialization difficulties limit the use of nanoparticle adsorbents. Magnetic primary nano-Fe3O4 particles (∼16.7...

A Novel and Comprehensive Trust Estimation Clustering Based Approach for Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: With the wide applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in various fields, such as environment monitoring, battlefield surveillance, healthcare, and intrusion detection, trust establishment among sensor nodes becomes a vital requirement to improve security, reliability, and successful cooperation. The existing trust management approaches for large-scale WSN are failed due to their low dependability (i.e., cooperation), higher communication, and memory overheads (i.e., resource inefficient). In this paper, we propose a novel and comprehensive trust estimation approach (LTS) for large-scale WSN that employs clustering to improve cooperation, trustworthiness, and security by detecting malicious (faulty or selfish) sensor nodes with reduced resource (memory and power) consumption. The proposed scheme (LTS) operates on two levels, namely, intra-cluster and inter-cluster along with distributed approach and centralized approach, respectively, to make accurate trust decision of sensor nodes with minimum overheads. LTS consists of unique features, such as robust trust estimation function, attack resistant, and efficient trust aggregation at the cluster, head to obtain the global feedback trust value. Data trust along with communication trust plays a significant role to cope with malicious nodes. In LTS, punishment and trust severity can be tuned according to the application requirement, which makes it an innovative LTS. Moreover, dishonest recommendations (outliers) are eliminated before aggregation at the base station by observing the statistical dispersion. The theoretical and mathematical validations along with simulation results exhibit the great performance of our proposed approach in terms of trust evaluation cost, prevention, and detection of malicious nodes as well as communication overhead.

Association mapping in plants in the post-GWAS genomics era.

Abstract: With the availability of DNA-based molecular markers during early 1980s and that of sophisticated statistical tools in late 1980s and later, it became possible to identify genomic regions that control a quantitative trait. The two methods used for this purpose included quantitative trait loci (QTL) interval mapping and genome-wide association mapping/studies (GWAS). Both these methods have their own merits and demerits, so that newer approaches were developed in order to deal with the demerits. We have now entered a post-GWAS era, where either the original data on individual genotypes are being used again keeping in view the results of GWAS or else summary statistics obtained through GWAS is subjected to further analysis. The first half of this review briefly deals with the approaches that were used for GWAS, the GWAS results obtained in some major crops (maize, wheat, rice, sorghum and soybean), their utilization for crop improvement and the improvements made to address the limitations of original GWA studies (computational demand, multiple testing and false discovery, rare marker alleles, etc.). These improvements included the development of multi-locus and multi-trait analysis, joint linkage association mapping, etc. Since originally GWA studies were used for mere identification of marker-trait association for marker-assisted selection, the second half of the review is devoted to activities in post-GWAS era, which include different methods that are being used for identification of causal variants and their prioritization (meta-analysis, pathway-based analysis, methylation QTL), functional characterization of candidate signals, gene- and gene-set based association mapping, GWAS using high dimensional data through machine learning, etc. The last section deals with popular resources available for GWAS in plants in the post-GWAS era and the implications of the results of post-GWAS for crop improvement.

Self-assembled nanostructures of 3D hierarchical faceted-iron oxide containing vertical carbon nanotubes on reduced graphene oxide hybrids for enhanced electromagnetic interface shielding

Abstract: The self-assembled three dimensional (3D) hybrids nanostructure containing uniform growth of vertical carbon nanotubes (VCNTs) with faceted iron oxide nanoparticles (f-Fe3O4 NPs) on the surfaces of reduced graphene oxide nanosheets (rGO NSs) is achieved using microwave assisted approach. The formation of hierarchical 3D f-Fe3O4-VCNTs@rGO hybrids, using microwave method is a rapid, simple, and inexpensive synthetic route. First, the VCNTs grow with help of Fe NPs, and after oxidizing of Fe NPs in form of f-Fe3O4 NPs, the growth has terminated resulting in formation of small size (

Direct and indirect evidences of BDNF and NGF as key modulators in depression: role of antidepressants treatment

Abstract: Purpose: Depression is one of the most prevalent, recurrent and life-threatening mental illnesses. However, the precise mechanism underlying the disorder is not yet clearly understood. It is theref...

Farmer typology to understand differentiated climate change adaptation in Himalaya

Abstract: Smallholder farmers’ responses to the climate-induced agricultural changes are not uniform but rather diverse, as response adaptation strategies are embedded in the heterogonous agronomic, social, economic, and institutional conditions. There is an urgent need to understand the diversity within the farming households, identify the main drivers and understand its relationship with household adaptation strategies. Typology construction provides an efficient method to understand farmer diversity by delineating groups with common characteristics. In the present study, based in the Uttarakhand state of Indian Western Himalayas, five farmer types were identified on the basis of resource endowment and agriculture orientation characteristics. Factor analysis followed by sequential agglomerative hierarchial and K-means clustering was use to delineate farmer types. Examination of adaptation strategies across the identified farmer types revealed that mostly contrasting and type-specific bundle of strategies are adopted by farmers to ensure livelihood security. Our findings show that strategies that incurred high investment, such as infrastructural development, are limited to high resource-endowed farmers. In contrast, the low resourced farmers reported being progressively disengaging with farming as a livelihood option. Our results suggest that the proponents of effective adaptation policies in the Himalayan region need to be cognizant of the nuances within the farming communities to capture the diverse and multiple adaptation needs and constraints of the farming households.

Neutralization technique based two and four port high isolation MIMO antennas for UWB communication

Abstract: In this paper, two compact and small size 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antennas are designed and fabricated for ultra-wideband applications. Using the neutralization line technique, the mutual coupling between the radiating patches is highly reduced. The overall dimension of the proposed 2 × 2 and 4 × 4 UWB MIMO antennas are 21 × 34 × 1.6 mm3 and 48 × 34 × 1.6 mm3, respectively. The measured bandwidth of 95.22% (3.51–9.89 GHz) and 96.47% (3.52–10.08 GHz) with better isolation of ≤–22 dB and ≤–23 dB for 2 port and 4 port antennas are, respectively, achieved. The measured (4 × 4 antenna) realized gain and radiation efficiency vary from 0.95 to 2.91 dB and from 70.01% to 79.87% respectively, throughout the entire frequency band. Moreover, the performance of 4 × 4 MIMO antenna, in terms of isolation, realized gain, radiation efficiency, envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), mean effective gain (MEG), total active reflection coefficient (TARC), channel capacity loss (CCL) and radiation patterns are studied and corresponding results are validated with the measured results.

Origin of ferromagnetism in Cu-doped ZnO.

Abstract: It is widely reported during last decade on the observation of room temperature ferromagnetism (RTFM) in doped ZnO and other transition metal oxides. However, the origin of RTFM is not understood and highly debated. While investigating the origin of RTFM, magnetic ion doped oxides should be excluded because it is not yet settled whether RTFM is intrinsic or due to the magnetic ion cluster in ZnO. Hence, it is desirable to investigate the origin of RTFM in non-magnetic ion doped ZnO and Cu-doped ZnO will be most suitable for this purpose. The important features of ferromagnetism observed in doped ZnO are (i) observation of RTFM at a doping concentration much below than the percolation threshold of wurtzite ZnO, (ii) temperature independence of magnetization and (iii) almost anhysteretic magnetization curve. We show that all these features of ferromagnetism in ZnO are due to overlapping of bound magnetic polarons (BMPs) which are created by exchange interaction between the spin of Cu2+ ion and spin of the localized hole due to zinc vacancy [Formula: see text]. Both the experimental and theoretical investigation show that the exchange interaction between Cu2+-Cu2+ ions mediated by [Formula: see text] is responsible for RTFM in Cu-doped ZnO.

Resistance against Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in soybean involves a reprogramming of the phenylpropanoid pathway and up-regulation of antifungal activity targeting ergosterol biosynthesis.

Abstract: Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, a predominately necrotrophic fungal pathogen with a broad host range, causes a significant yield-limiting disease of soybean called Sclerotinia stem rot. Resistance mechanisms against this pathogen in soybean are poorly understood, thus hindering the commercial deployment of resistant varieties. We used a multiomic approach utilizing RNA-sequencing, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and chemical genomics in yeast to decipher the molecular mechanisms governing resistance to S. sclerotiorum in soybean. Transcripts and metabolites of two soybean recombinant inbred lines, one resistant and one susceptible to S. sclerotiorum were analysed in a time course experiment. The combined results show that resistance to S. sclerotiorum in soybean is associated in part with an early accumulation of JA-Ile ((+)-7-iso-jasmonoyl-L-isoleucine), a bioactive jasmonate, increased ability to scavenge reactive oxygen species, and importantly, a reprogramming of the phenylpropanoid pathway leading to increased antifungal activities. Indeed, we noted that phenylpropanoid pathway intermediates, such as 4-hydroxybenzoate, cinnamic acid, ferulic acid and caffeic acid, were highly accumulated in the resistant line. In vitro assays show that these metabolites and total stem extracts from the resistant line clearly affect S. sclerotiorum growth and development. Using chemical genomics in yeast, we further show that this antifungal activity targets ergosterol biosynthesis in the fungus, by disrupting enzymes involved in lipid and sterol biosynthesis. Overall, our results are consistent with a model where resistance to S. sclerotiorum in soybean coincides with an early recognition of the pathogen, leading to the modulation of the redox capacity of the host and the production of antifungal metabolites.

Associations of autozygosity with a broad range of human phenotypes

Abstract: In many species, the offspring of related parents suffer reduced reproductive success, a phenomenon known as inbreeding depression. In humans, the importance of this effect has remained unclear, partly because reproduction between close relatives is both rare and frequently associated with confounding social factors. Here, using genomic inbreeding coefficients (FROH) for >1.4 million individuals, we show that FROH is significantly associated (p < 0.0005) with apparently deleterious changes in 32 out of 100 traits analysed. These changes are associated with runs of homozygosity (ROH), but not with common variant homozygosity, suggesting that genetic variants associated with inbreeding depression are predominantly rare. The effect on fertility is striking: FROH equivalent to the offspring of first cousins is associated with a 55% decrease [95% CI 44-66%] in the odds of having children. Finally, the effects of FROH are confirmed within full-sibling pairs, where the variation in FROH is independent of all environmental confounding.

Temperature and Precipitation trends in Kashmir valley, North Western Himalayas

Abstract: Climate change has emerged as an important issue ever to confront mankind. This concern emerges from the fact that our day-to-day activities are leading to impacts on the Earth’s atmosphere that has the potential to significantly alter the planet’s shield and radiation balance. Developing countries particularly whose income is particularly derived from agricultural activities are at the forefront of bearing repercussions due to changing climate. The present study is an effort to analyze the changing trends of precipitation and temperature variables in Kashmir valley along different elevation zones in the north western part of India. As the Kashmir valley has a rich repository of glaciers with its annual share of precipitation, slight change in the temperature and precipitation regime has far reaching environmental and economic consequences. The results from Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) data of the period 1980–2014 reveals that the annual mean temperature of Kashmir valley has increased significantly. Accelerated warming has been observed during 1980–2014, with intense warming in the recent years (2001–2014). During the period 1980–2014, steeper increase, in annual mean maximum temperature than annual mean minimum temperature, has been observed. In addition, mean maximum temperature in plain regions has shown higher rate of increase when compared with mountainous areas. In case of mean minimum temperature, mountainous regions have shown higher rate of increase. Analysis of precipitation data for the same period shows a decreasing trend with mountainous regions having the highest rate of decrease which can be quite hazardous for the fragile mountain environment of the Kashmir valley housing a large number of glaciers.