Harnessing nature's defenders: unveiling the potential of microbial consortia for plant defense induction against Alternaria blight in cumin.

Present study was aimed to develop an efficient microbial consortium for combating Alternaria blight disease in cumin. The research involved isolating biocontrol agents against Alternaria burnsii, characterizing their biocontrol and growth promotion traits, and assessing compatibility. A pot experiment was conducted during rabi season of 2022-2023 to evaluate the bioefficacy of four biocontrol agents (1F, 16B, 31B, and 223B) individually and in consortium, focusing on disease severity, plant growth promotion, and defense responses in cumin challenged with A. burnsii. Microbial isolates 1F, 16B, 31B, and 223B significantly inhibited A. burnsii growth in dual plate assays (~ 86%), displaying promising biocontrol and plant growth promotion activities. They were identified as Trichoderma afroharzianum 1F, Aneurinibacillus aneurinilyticus 16B, Pseudomonas lalkuanensis 31B, and Bacillus licheniformis 223B, respectively. The excellent compatibility was observed among all selected biocontrol agents. Cumin plants treated with consortia of 1F + 16B + 31B + 223B showed least percent disease index (32.47%) and highest percent disease control (64.87%). Consortia of biocontrol agents significantly enhanced production of secondary metabolites (total phenol, flavonoids, antioxidant, and tannin) and activation of antioxidant-defense enzymes (POX, PPOX, CAT, SOD, PAL, and TAL) compared to individual biocontrol treatment and infected control. Moreover, consortium treatments effectively reduced electrolyte leakage over the individual biocontrol agent and infected control treatment. The four-microbe consortium significantly enhanced chlorophyll (154%), carotenoid content (88%), plant height (78.77%), dry weight (72.81%), and seed yield (104%) compared to infected control. Based on these findings, this environmentally friendly four-microbe consortium may be recommended for managing Alternaria blight in cumin.

Is Restoration of Sagittal Spinopelvic Parameters Necessary in Spinal Tuberculosis of Lumbar and Lumbosacral Spine? Conservative versus Operative Management.

BACKGROUND: The relationship of spinopelvic parameters with spondylolisthesis is widely explored. However, there is scarce evidence on correlation of tuberculosis of lumbar spine with respect to spinopelvic harmony. The current study aims to find the association between functional outcomes and spinopelvic parameters in lumbar spine tuberculosis treatment. METHODS: A total of 47 patients with active tuberculosis confined to lumbar spine were prospectively analyzed and divided into 2 groups according to mode of intervention. Group A included 26 operatively managed patients and group B had 21 conservatively managed cases. Functional parameters comprising Oswestry Disability Index (ODI) and Visual Analog Scale (VAS) along with spinopelvic radiologic parameters (pelvic incidence [PI], pelvic tilt [PT], sacral slope [SS], lumbar lordosis [LL], PI-LL, sagittal vertical axis) in both groups were analyzed at 0 and 6 months of follow-up. RESULTS: Both the groups showed significant improvement from initial presentation to final follow-up in ODI (Group A: 85.4 ± 12.1-12.3 ± 3.2, P = 0.02; Group B: 82.5 ± 10.06-36.8 ± 11.9, P = 0.04) and VAS (Group A: 8.1 ± 1.2-1.4 ± 0.9, P = 0.02; Group B: 8.5 ± 0.09-3.5 ± 1.1, P = 0.02). Statistically significant (P < 0.05) difference was observed in both functional outcome parameters between the 2 groups at 2-month and 6-month follow-up, compared with nonsignificant difference (P > 0.05) at presentation. Better improvements of spinopelvic parameters of PT, SS, LL, PI-LL were observed in Group A and in both groups the difference of these parameters correlated with differences of functional outcome parameters, though PI showed no correlation. CONCLUSIONS: The spinopelvic parameters played significant role in functional outcome. There is better functional outcome when LL is adequately restored. Surgical correction offered betterment of spinopelvic parameters like PT, SS, an sagittal vertical axis, which in turn leads to improvement in functional outcome.

Formulations of synergistic microbial consortia for enhanced systemic resistance against Fusarium wilt in cumin.

The study aimed to understand the dynamic interplay between plants and their associated microbes to develop an efficient microbial consortium for managing Fusarium wilt of cumin. A total of 601 rhizospheric and endophytic bacteria and fungi were screened for antagonistic activity against Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cumini (Foc). Subsequently, ten bacteria and ten fungi were selected for characterizing their growth promotion traits and ability to withstand abiotic stress. Furthermore, a pot experiment was conducted to evaluate the bioefficacy of promising biocontrol isolates-1F, 16B, 31B, and 223B in mono and consortium mode, focusing on disease severity, plant growth, and defense responses in cumin challenged with Foc. Promising isolates were identified as Trichoderma atrobruneum 15F, Pseudomonas sp. 2B, Bacillus amyloliquefaciens 9B, and Bacillus velezensis 32B. In planta, results revealed that cumin plants treated with consortia of 15F, 2B, 9B, and 32B showed highest percent disease control (76.35%) in pot experiment. Consortia of biocontrol agents significantly enhanced production of secondary metabolites and activation of antioxidant-defense enzymes compared to individual strain. Moreover, consortium treatments effectively reduced electrolyte leakage over the individual strain and positive control. The four-microbe consortium significantly enhanced chlorophyll (~ 2.74-fold), carotenoid content (~ 2.14-fold), plant height (~ 1.8-fold), dry weight (~ 1.96-fold), and seed yield (~ 19-fold) compared to positive control in pot experiment. Similarly, four microbe consortia showed highest percent disease control (72.2%) over the positive control in field trial. Moreover, plant growth, biomass, yield, and yield attributes of cumin were also significantly increased in field trial over the positive control as well as negative control.

Comparative evaluation of dentinal tubule penetration and push-out bond strength of new injectable hydraulic calcium disilicate based root canal sealer: A single blinded in vitro study.

Objective: To evaluate and compare dentinal tubule penetration and push-out bond strength of BIO-C ION+, AH Plus and NanoSeal-S using Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy (CLSM) and Universal Testing Machine (UTM). Materials & method: Sixty human mandibular premolars were prepared using ProTaper Gold till F3. Samples were then divided into 3 groups: Group I (n = 20) BIO-C ION + sealer, Group II (n = 20) AH Plus and Group III (n = 20) NanoSeal-S sealer. Groups were then sub-divided into two sub groups: In Subgroup A (n = 10) samples were obturated using single-cone with 0.1 % Rhodamine B dye and in Subgroup B (n = 10) samples were obturated using single cone. The samples were then transversely sectioned into coronal, middle and apical segments, samples in subgroup A & B were then submitted to CLSM analysis and UTM respectively. Results: The Bond Strength data showed following means (MPa): Group I Subgroup B: (BIO-C ION+) coronal (1.64), middle (1.25), apical (0.93); Group II Subgroup B: (AH Plus) coronal (2.20), middle (1.85) apical (1.38) and Group III Subgroup B: (NanoSeal-S) coronal (1.26), middle (0.94), apical (0.58). The dentinal tubule penetration data showed following means: (µm) Group I Subgroup A (BIO-C ION+) coronal (1184.69), middle (997.03), apical (637.26); Group II Subgroup-A AH Plus (864.14) and NanoSeal-S (495.64). Statistical analysis (two-way ANOVA, Tukey's Post Hoc Test) showed significant difference among sealers (p < 0.001) and root canal thirds (p < 0.001). Conclusion: The results of the study concluded that BIO-C ION + sealer showed maximum dentinal tubule penetration and AH Plus demonstrated maximum push-out bond strength.

Healing Assessment of Spinal Tuberculosis: A Systematic Review.

OBJECTIVE: Deciding the healing end point in spinal tuberculosis (STB) remains a controversial topic. The current systematic review aims to address the controversy existing in the literature to find a comprehensive method to assess healing in STB. METHODS: A thorough literature search was carried out for studies with the assessment of healing parameters in STB. Data extraction was carried out manually, which included study characteristics and healing criteria evaluated in each study. RESULTS: Qualitative analysis of 8 included studies showed that healing parameters were described in 3 domains: clinical, hematologic, and radiologic response of the patient to antitubercular chemotherapy. Each domain included various individual parameters, with clinical and radiologic assessment criteria being used in most of the studies. Improvement in terms of pain, constitutional symptoms, weight gain, neurology; variation in erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein; and changes in radiography, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography were found to be promising predictors in the assessment of healing. CONCLUSIONS: Radiologic response parameters emerged as the maximally used criteria to assess healing in STB. However, in the absence of any statistical analysis and an observed lag in radiologic response, the cumulative effect of all the parameters in 3 domains (clinical, hematologic, and radiologic) can be used to declare a spinal tubercular lesion nonhealing, healing, or healed.

Retinoblastoma: A review of the molecular basis of tumor development and its clinical correlation in shaping future targeted treatment strategies.

Retinoblastoma is a retinal cancer that affects children and is the most prevalent intraocular tumor worldwide. Despite tremendous breakthroughs in our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that regulate progression of retinoblastoma, the development of targeted therapeutics for retinoblastoma has lagged. Our review highlights the current developments in the genetic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, and proteomic landscapes of retinoblastoma. We also discuss their clinical relevance and potential implications for future therapeutic development, with the aim to create a frontline multimodal therapy for retinoblastoma.

Experimental analysis of enhanced solar still operating with induced turbulence.

This work experimentally investigates the performance of solar still with induced turbulence (SWIT) which operates with a novel approach for improved productivity. A metal wire net has been submerged in basin water of still and direct current vibration micro motor has been used to develop small intensity vibrations in wire net. These vibrations serve to induce turbulence in basin water and also break the thermal boundary layer between still surface and water to enhance the evaporation. The energy-exergy-economic-environment analysis of SWIT has been performed and compared with conventional solar still (CS) of identical size. The overall heat transfer coefficient of SWIT is found to be 66% more in comparison of CS. The SWIT provided 53% increase in yield and it is 55% more thermally efficient than CS. The average exergy efficiency of the SWIT is found to be 76% higher than that of CS. The cost of water from SWIT is 0.028 $ with a payback period of 0.74 years and the carbon credit gained by SWIT is found to be 105 $. The productivity of SWIT has also been compared for intervals of 5, 10, and 15 min between the induced turbulence to find suitable interval duration.

Accumulation of resveratrol, ferulic acid and iron in seeds confer iron deficiency chlorosis tolerance to a novel genetic stock of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) grown in calcareous soils.

Peanut is mostly grown in calcareous soils with high pH which are deficient in available iron (Fe2+) for plant uptake causing iron deficiency chlorosis (IDC). The most pertinent solution is to identify efficient genotypes showing tolerance to limited Fe availability in the soil. A field screening of 40 advanced breeding lines of peanut using NRCG 7472 and ICGV 86031 as IDC susceptible and tolerant checks, respectively, was envisaged for four years. PBS 22040 and 29,192 exhibited maximum tolerance while PBS 12215 and 12,185 were most susceptible. PBS 22040 accumulated maximum seed resveratrol (5.8 ± 0.08 ppm), ferulic acid (378.6 ± 0.31 ppm) and Fe (45.59 ± 0.41 ppm) content. Enhanced chlorophyll retention (8.72-9.50 µg ml-1), carotenoid accumulation (1.96-2.08 µg ml-1), and antioxidant enzyme activity (APX: 35.9-103.9%; POX: 51- 145%) reduced the MDA accumulation (5.61-9.11 µM cm-1) in tolerant lines. The overexpression of Fe transporters IRT1, ZIP5, YSL3 was recorded to the tune of 2.3-9.54; 1.45-3.7; 2.20-2.32- folds respectively in PBS 22040 and 29,192, over NRCG 7472. PBS 22040 recorded the maximum pod yield (282 ± 4.6 g/row), hundred kernel weight (55 ± 0.7 g) and number of pods per three plants (54 ± 1.7). The study thus reports new insights into the roles of resveratrol, ferulic acid and differential antioxidant enzyme activities in imparting IDC tolerance. PBS 22040, being the best performing line, can be the potent source of IDC tolerance for introgression in high yielding but susceptible genotypes under similar edaphic conditions. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12298-023-01321-9.

An expedient ion chromatography based method for high-throughput analysis of phytic acid in groundnut kernels.

A study was made to expedite ion chromatography method using IonPac analytical column and self-regenerating anion suppressor for phytic acid determination in groundnut seeds and compared with a widely adopted spectrophotometric method based on enzymatic hydrolysis. The Ion Chromatography method equipped with AG11 guard and AS11 analytical columns in isocratic mode using 65 mM NaOH mobile phase at 1 mL min-1 flow rate showed a sharp peak for phytic acid with a retention time of 2.42 ± 0.2 min. The peak area was plotted v/s concentration showed linearity with an R2 value of 0.997, detection limit of 0.028 mg L-1 and recovery of 98% as against R2 value of 0.988 and detection limit of 0.065 mg L-1 in the spectrophotometric method. The study demonstrates that Ion Chromatography method was more accurate with a better detection limit than spectrophotometry. Also, this method provides robust handling with lesser reagent requirements due to combined eluent generation and self-regenerating suppression. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13197-022-05527-9.

Modeling electronic health record data using an end-to-end knowledge-graph-informed topic model.

The rapid growth of electronic health record (EHR) datasets opens up promising opportunities to understand human diseases in a systematic way. However, effective extraction of clinical knowledge from EHR data has been hindered by the sparse and noisy information. We present Graph ATtention-Embedded Topic Model (GAT-ETM), an end-to-end taxonomy-knowledge-graph-based multimodal embedded topic model. GAT-ETM distills latent disease topics from EHR data by learning the embedding from a constructed medical knowledge graph. We applied GAT-ETM to a large-scale EHR dataset consisting of over 1 million patients. We evaluated its performance based on topic quality, drug imputation, and disease diagnosis prediction. GAT-ETM demonstrated superior performance over the alternative methods on all tasks. Moreover, GAT-ETM learned clinically meaningful graph-informed embedding of the EHR codes and discovered interpretable and accurate patient representations for patient stratification and drug recommendations. GAT-ETM code is available at https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/GAT-ETM .

MixEHR-Guided: A guided multi-modal topic modeling approach for large-scale automatic phenotyping using the electronic health record.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich clinical data collected at the point of the care, and their increasing adoption offers exciting opportunities for clinical informatics, disease risk prediction, and personalized treatment recommendation. However, effective use of EHR data for research and clinical decision support is often hampered by a lack of reliable disease labels. To compile gold-standard labels, researchers often rely on clinical experts to develop rule-based phenotyping algorithms from billing codes and other surrogate features. This process is tedious and error-prone due to recall and observer biases in how codes and measures are selected, and some phenotypes are incompletely captured by a handful of surrogate features. To address this challenge, we present a novel automatic phenotyping model called MixEHR-Guided (MixEHR-G), a multimodal hierarchical Bayesian topic model that efficiently models the EHR generative process by identifying latent phenotype structure in the data. Unlike existing topic modeling algorithms wherein the inferred topics are not identifiable, MixEHR-G uses prior information from informative surrogate features to align topics with known phenotypes. We applied MixEHR-G to an openly-available EHR dataset of 38,597 intensive care patients (MIMIC-III) in Boston, USA and to administrative claims data for a population-based cohort (PopHR) of 1.3 million people in Quebec, Canada. Qualitatively, we demonstrate that MixEHR-G learns interpretable phenotypes and yields meaningful insights about phenotype similarities, comorbidities, and epidemiological associations. Quantitatively, MixEHR-G outperforms existing unsupervised phenotyping methods on a phenotype label annotation task, and it can accurately estimate relative phenotype prevalence functions without gold-standard phenotype information. Altogether, MixEHR-G is an important step towards building an interpretable and automated phenotyping system using EHR data.

Mortality trends and length of stays among hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in Ontario and Québec (Canada): a population-based cohort study of the first three epidemic waves.

BACKGROUND: Epidemics of COVID-19 strained hospital resources. We describe temporal trends in mortality risk and length of stays in hospital and intensive care units (ICUs) among patients with COVID-19 hospitalized through the first three epidemic waves in Canada. METHODS: We used population-based provincial hospitalization data from the epicenters of Canada's epidemics (Ontario and Québec). Adjusted estimates were obtained using marginal standardization of logistic regression models, accounting for patient-level and hospital-level determinants. RESULTS: Using all hospitalizations from Ontario (N = 26,538) and Québec (N = 23,857), we found that unadjusted in-hospital mortality risks peaked at 31% in the first wave and was lowest at the end of the third wave at 6-7%. This general trend remained after adjustments. The odds of in-hospital mortality in the highest patient load quintile were 1.2-fold (95% CI: 1.0-1.4; Ontario) and 1.6-fold (95% CI: 1.3-1.9; Québec) that of the lowest quintile. Mean hospital and ICU length of stays decreased over time but ICU stays were consistently higher in Ontario than Québec. CONCLUSIONS: In-hospital mortality risks and length of ICU stays declined over time despite changing patient demographics. Continuous population-based monitoring of patient outcomes in an evolving epidemic is necessary for health system preparedness and response.

Effects of Confounding Bias in Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness Test-Negative Designs Due to Correlated Influenza and COVID-19 Vaccination Behaviors.

BACKGROUND: The test-negative design is commonly used to estimate influenza and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine effectiveness (VE). In these studies, correlated COVID-19 and influenza vaccine behaviors may introduce a confounding bias where controls are included with the other vaccine-preventable acute respiratory illness (ARI). We quantified the impact of this bias on VE estimates in studies where this bias is not addressed. METHODS: We simulated study populations under varying vaccination probabilities, COVID-19 VE, influenza VE, and proportions of controls included with the other vaccine-preventable ARI. Mean bias was calculated as the difference between estimated and true VE. Absolute mean bias in VE estimates was classified as low (<10%), moderate (10% to <20%), and high (≥20%). RESULTS: Where vaccination probabilities are positively correlated, COVID-19 and influenza VE test-negative studies with influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) ARI controls, respectively, underestimate VE. For COVID-19 VE studies, mean bias was low for all scenarios where influenza represented ≤25% of controls. For influenza VE studies, mean bias was low for all scenarios where SARS-CoV-2 represented ≤10% of controls. Although bias was driven by the conditional probability of vaccination, low VE of the vaccine of interest and high VE of the confounding vaccine increase its magnitude. CONCLUSIONS: Where a low percentage of controls is included with the other vaccine-preventable ARI, bias in COVID-19 and influenza VE estimates is low. However, influenza VE estimates are likely more susceptible to bias. Researchers should consider potential bias and its implications in their respective study settings to make informed methodological decisions in test-negative VE studies.

Rapid Response Preparedness for Management of Post-Covid Invasive Rhino-Orbito-Cerebral Fungal Infections: Experience from a Tertiary Care Government Institute in India.

Sudden surge of Post Covid-19 Rhino-orbito-mucormycosis cases has left entire ENT fraternity in the center of a war room. We present a quick administrative preparedness for this situation in a tertiary care Government Institute in India. This model may serve as a reference for other centers.