A catchment scale assessment of water balance components: a case study of Chittar catchment in South India.

The detailed analyses of the water balance components (WBCs) of the catchment help assess the available water resources, especially in the arid climate regions for their sustainable management and development. This paper mainly used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to analyze the variation in the WBCs considering the change in the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) and meteorological variables. For this purpose, the model used the inputs of LULC and meteorological variables between 2001 and 2020 at 5 years and daily time intervals, respectively, from the Chittar river catchment. The developed models were calibrated using SWAT-CUP split-up procedure (pre-calibration and post-calibration). The model was found to be good in calibration and validation, yielding the coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.94 and 0.81, respectively. Furthermore, WBCs of the catchment were estimated for the near future (2021-2030) at the monthly and annual scales. For this endeavor, LULC was forecasted for the years 2021 and 2026 using Cellular Automata (CA)-Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and for the same period, meteorological variables were also forecasted using the smoothing moving average method from the historical data.

Evaluation of apoptogenic adenovirus type 5 oncolytic vectors in a Syrian hamster head and neck cancer model.

Human adenovirus (HAdV) vectors are intensely investigated for virotherapy of a wide variety of human cancers. Here, we have evaluated the effect of two apoptogenic HAdV5 vectors in an immunocompetent Syrian hamster animal model of head and neck cancer. We established two cell lines of hamster cheek pouch squamous cell carcinomas, induced by treatment with 9,10-dimethyl-1,2-benzanthracene. These cell lines, when infected with HAdV5 mutants lp11w and lp11w/Δ55 K (which are defective in the expression of either E1B-19 K alone or both E1B-19 K and E1B-55 K proteins) exhibited enhanced apoptotic and cytotoxic responses. The cheek pouch tumor cells transplanted either subcutaneously at the flanks or in the cheek pouches of hamsters readily formed tumors. Intratumoral administration of HAdV5-E1B mutants efficiently suppressed the growth of tumors at both sites. Histological examination of orthotopic tumors revealed reduced vascularity and the expression of the viral fiber antigen in virus-administered cheek pouch tumors. These tumors also exhibited increased caspase-3 levels, suggesting that virus-induced apoptosis may contribute to tumor growth suppression. Our results suggest that the apoptogenic HAdV5 vectors may have utility for the treatment of human head and neck cancers.