Jawaharlal Nehru University

About: Jawaharlal Nehru University is a education organization based out in New Delhi, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Candida albicans. The organization has 6082 authors who have published 13455 publications receiving 245407 citations. The organization is also known as: JNU.

Group B Streptococcus : global incidence and vaccine development

Abstract: An ongoing public health challenge is to develop vaccines that are effective against infectious diseases that have global relevance Vaccines against serotypes of group B Streptococcus (GBS) that are prevalent in the United States and Europe are not optimally efficacious against serotypes common to other parts of the world New technologies and innovative approaches are being used to identify GBS antigens that overcome serotype-specificity and that could form the basis of a globally effective vaccine against this opportunistic pathogen This Review highlights efforts towards this goal and describes a template that can be followed to develop vaccines against other bacterial pathogens

Edge of Things: The Big Picture on the Integration of Edge, IoT and the Cloud in a Distributed Computing Environment

Abstract: A centralized infrastructure system carries out existing data analytics and decision-making processes from our current highly virtualized platform of wireless networks and the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. There is a high possibility that these existing methods will encounter more challenges and issues in relation to network dynamics, resulting in a high overhead in the network response time, leading to latency and traffic. In order to avoid these problems in the network and achieve an optimum level of resource utilization, a new paradigm called edge computing (EC) is proposed to pave the way for the evolution of new age applications and services. With the integration of EC, the processing capabilities are pushed to the edge of network devices such as smart phones, sensor nodes, wearables, and on-board units, where data analytics and knowledge generation are performed which removes the necessity for a centralized system. Many IoT applications, such as smart cities, the smart grid, smart traffic lights, and smart vehicles, are rapidly upgrading their applications with EC, significantly improving response time as well as conserving network resources. Irrespective of the fact that EC shifts the workload from a centralized cloud to the edge, the analogy between EC and the cloud pertaining to factors such as resource management and computation optimization are still open to research studies. Hence, this paper aims to validate the efficiency and resourcefulness of EC. We extensively survey the edge systems and present a comparative study of cloud computing systems. After analyzing the different network properties in the system, the results show that EC systems perform better than cloud computing systems. Finally, the research challenges in implementing an EC system and future research directions are discussed.

Fungicidal activity of thymol and carvacrol by disrupting ergosterol biosynthesis and membrane integrity against Candida

Abstract: Natural isopropyl cresols have been reported to have antifungal activity. This work is an attempt to examine thymol and carvacrol against 111 fluconazole-sensitive and -resistant Candida isolates. Insight into the mechanism of action was elucidated by flow cytometric analysis, confocal imaging and ergosterol biosynthesis studies. The susceptibility tests for the test compounds were carried out in terms of minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs), disc diffusion assays and time-kill curves against all Candida isolates by employing standard protocols. Propidium iodide (PI) cell sorting has been investigated by flow cytometric analysis and confocal imaging. Haemolytic activity on human erythrocytes was studied to exclude the possibility of further associated cytotoxicity. Both compounds were found to be effective to varying extents against all isolates, including the resistant strains. In contrast to the fungistatic nature of fluconazole, our compounds were found to exhibit fungicidal nature. Significant impairment of ergosterol biosynthesis was pronouncedly induced by the test entities. Negligible cytoxicity was observed for the same compounds. Furthermore, it was observed that the positional difference of the hydroxyl group in carvacrol slightly changes its antifungal activity. Carvacrol and thymol show strong fungicidal effect against all of the Candida isolates. The mechanisms of action of these natural isopropyl cresols appear to originate from the inhibition of ergosterol biosynthesis and the disruption of membrane integrity.

Anomaly detection in ECG time signals via deep long short-term memory networks

Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) signals are widely used to gauge the health of the human heart, and the resulting time series signal is often analyzed manually by a medical professional to detect any arrhythmia that the patient may have suffered. Much work has been done to automate the process of analyzing ECG signals, but most of the research involves extensive preprocessing of the ECG data to derive vectorized features and subsequently designing a classifier to discriminate between healthy ECG signals and those indicative of an Arrhythmia. This approach requires knowledge and data of the different types of Arrhythmia for training. However, the heart is a complex organ and there are many different and new types of Arrhythmia that can occur which were not part of the original training set. Thus, it may be more prudent to adopt an anomaly detection approach towards analyzing ECG signals. In this paper, we utilize a deep recurrent neural network architecture with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) units to develop a predictive model for healthy ECG signals. We further utilize the probability distribution of the prediction errors from these recurrent models to indicate normal or abnormal behavior. An added advantage of using LSTM networks is that the ECG signal can be directly fed into the network without any elaborate preprocessing as required by other techniques. Also, no prior information about abnormal signals is needed by the networks as they were trained only on normal data. We have used the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database to obtain ECG time series data for both normal periods and for periods during four different types of Arrhythmias, namely Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC), Atrial Premature Contraction (APC), Paced Beats (PB) and Ventricular Couplet (VC). Results are promising and indicate that Deep LSTM models may be viable for detecting anomalies in ECG signals.

Mode-coupling theory and the glass transition in supercooled liquids

Abstract: Mode-coupling theory is an approach to the study of complex behavior in the supercooled liquids which developed from the idea of a nonlinear feedback mechanism. From the coupling of slowly decaying correlation functions the theory predicts the existence of a characteristic temperature ${T}_{c}$ above the experimental glass transition temperature ${T}_{g}$ for the liquid. This article discusses the various methods used to obtain the model equations and illustrates the effects of structure on dynamics and scaling behavior over different time scales using a wave-vector-dependent model. It compares the theoretical predictions, experimental observations, and computer simulation results, and also considers phenomenological extensions of mode-coupling theory. Numerical solutions of the model equations to study the dynamics from a nonperturbative approach are also reviewed. The review looks briefly at recent observations from landscape studies of model systems of structural glasses and their relation to the mode-coupling temperature ${T}_{c}$. The equations for the mean-field dynamics driven by the $p$-spin interaction Hamiltonian are similar to those of mode-coupling theory for structural glasses. Related developments in the nonequilibrium dynamics and generalization of the fluctuation-dissipation relation for the structural glasses are briefly touched upon. The review ends with a summary of the open questions and possible future direction of the field.