A Rare and Intriguing Case Report of Metaplastic Breast Carcinoma.

Metaplastic breast carcinoma (MBC) is a rare and aggressive subtype of breast cancer characterized by the presence of both epithelial and mesenchymal components within the tumor. Its clinical and radiological appearance is comparable to other types of breast cancer, but it grows rapidly. The diagnosis of metaplastic carcinoma is largely based on the epithelial origin of the cells confirmed by immunohistochemistry (IHC). Compared to invasive ductal carcinoma, metaplastic carcinoma has a worse overall survival rate. Any patient with a rapidly growing breast mass should be assessed with suspicion of sarcomatoid or metaplastic malignant neoplasm. We report this case due to its rarity and the complex nature of the disease.

Metabolic Mechanisms Underlying Heat and Drought Tolerance in Lentil Accessions: Implications for Stress Tolerance Breeding.

Climate change has significantly exacerbated the effects of abiotic stresses, particularly high temperatures and drought stresses. This study aims to uncover the mechanisms underlying heat and drought tolerance in lentil accessions. To achieve this objective, twelve accessions were subjected to high-temperature stress (32/20 °C), while seven accessions underwent assessment under drought stress conditions (50% of field capacity) during the reproductive stage. Our findings revealed a significant increase in catalase activity across all accessions under both stress conditions, with ILL7814 and ILL7835 recording the highest accumulations of 10.18 and 9.33 under drought stress, respectively, and 14 µmol H2O2 mg protein-1 min-1 under high temperature. Similarly, ascorbate peroxidase significantly increased in all tolerant accessions due to high temperatures, with ILL6359, ILL7835, and ILL8029 accumulating the highest values with up 50 µmol ascorbate mg protein-1 min-1. In contrast, no significant increase was obtained for all accessions subjected to water stress, although the drought-tolerant accessions accumulated more APX activity (16.59 t to 25.08 µmol ascorbate mg protein-1 min-1) than the sensitive accessions. The accessions ILL6075, ILL7814, and ILL8029 significantly had the highest superoxide dismutase activity under high temperature, while ILL6363, ILL7814, and ILL7835 accumulated the highest values under drought stress, each with 22 to 25 units mg protein-1. Under both stress conditions, ILL7814 and ILL7835 recorded the highest contents in proline (38 to 45 µmol proline/g FW), total flavonoids (0.22 to 0.77 mg QE g-1 FW), total phenolics (7.50 to 8.79 mg GAE g-1 FW), total tannins (5.07 to 20 µg CE g-1 FW), and total antioxidant activity (60 to 70%). Further, ILL7814 and ILL6338 significantly recorded the highest total soluble sugar content under high temperature (71.57 and 74.24 mg g-1, respectively), while ILL7835 achieved the maximum concentration (125 mg g-1) under drought stress. The accessions ILL8029, ILL6104, and ILL7814 had the highest values of reducing sugar under high temperature with 0.62 to 0.79 mg g-1, whereas ILL6075, ILL6363, and ILL6362 accumulated the highest levels of this component under drought stress with 0.54 to 0.66 mg g-1. Overall, our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the metabolomic responses of lentil to drought and heat stresses, serving as a valuable reference for lentil stress tolerance breeding.

Lignite Scaffolding as Slow-Release N-Fertilizer Extended the SN Retention and Inhibited N Losses in Alkaline Calcareous Soils.

Conventional nitrogen (N) fertilizers particularly urea mineralized quickly in soil. Without sufficient plant uptake, this rapid mineralization favors the heavy N losses. Lignite is a naturally abundant and cost-effective adsorbent capable of extending multiple benefits as a soil amendment. Therefore, it was hypothesized that lignite as an N carrier for the synthesis of lignite-based slow-release N fertilizer (LSRNF) could offer an eco-friendly and affordable option to resolve the limitations of existing N fertilizer formulations. The LSRNF was developed by impregnating urea on deashed lignite and pelletized by a mixture of polyvinyl alcohol and starch as a binder. The results indicated that LSRNF significantly delayed the N mineralization and extended its release to >70 days. The surface morphology and physicochemical properties of LSRNF confirmed the sorption of urea on lignite. The study demonstrated that LSRNF also significantly decreased the NH3-volatilization up to 44.55%, NO3-leaching up to 57.01%, and N2O-emission up to 52.18% compared to conventional urea. So, this study proved that lignite is a suitable material to formulate new slow-release fertilizers, suiting to alkaline calcareous soils favorably where N losses are further higher compared to non-calcareous soils.

Plant Growth Regulators with a Balanced Supply of Nutrients Enhance the Phytoextraction Efficiency of Parthenium hysterophorus for Cadmium in Contaminated Soil.

Heavy metal contamination in soil, such as cadmium (Cd), poses a serious threat to global food security and human health. It must be managed using environmentally friendly and cost-effective technologies. Plants with high resistance to Cd stress and high biomass production could be potential candidates for the phytoremediation of Cd-contaminated soils to improve Cd phytoextraction. In this regard, the present study was carried out to determine the effect of gibberellic acid (GA3), indole acetic acid (IAA), and fertilizers (N, P, and K) on Parthenium hysterophorus growth and biomass production as well as Cd phytoextraction capabilities. A pot experiment was conducted with various combinations of PGRs and fertilizers, with treatments arranged in five replicates using a completely randomized design. After harvesting, each plant was divided into various parts such as stems, roots, and leaves, and different growth, physiological, and biochemical parameters were recorded. Results showed that under Cd stress, growth, physiological, and biochemical parameters were all significantly decreased. With the combined application of plant growth regulators (GA3 and IAA) and nutrients, Cd stress was alleviated and all parameters significantly improved. In comparison to the control treatment, the combined application of N + P + K + GA3 + IAA resulted in the highest fresh and dry biomass production of the root (12.31 and 5.11 g pot-1), shoot (19. 69 and 6.99 g pot-1), leaves (16.56 and 7.09 g pot-1), and entire plant (48.56 and 19.19 g pot-1). Similarly, the same treatment resulted in higher chlorophyll a and b and total chlorophyll contents under Cd stress, which were 2.19, 2.03, and 3.21 times higher than the control, which was Cd stress without any treatment. The combination of N + P + K + GA3 + IAA also resulted in the highest proline and phenolic contents. In the case of different enzyme activities, the combined application of N + P + K + GA3 + IAA under Cd stress led to a high increase in catalase (2.5 times), superoxide (3.5 times), and peroxidase (3.7 times) compared to the control. With the combined application of N+ P+ K + GA3 + IAA, the maximum values of BCF (8.25), BAC (2.6), and RF (5.14%) were measured for phytoextraction potential. On the basis of these findings, it is concluded that P. hysterophorus has a high potential to grow, produce the most biomass, and act as a Cd hyperaccumulator in Cd-contaminated soil.

Assessing the Stability of Herbicide-Tolerant Lentil Accessions (Lens culinaris Medik.) under Diverse Environments.

Assessing the adaptability and stability of herbicide-tolerant lentil accessions to two broad-spectrum post-emergence herbicides in multi-environment trials has become a must in a breeding program to improve its selection. The adaptability and stability of 42 herbicide-tolerant lentil accessions were investigated using five stability parameters under eight different environments. Significant Genotype-Environment (GE) interaction was found for days to flowering (DFLR), days to maturity (DMAT), and seed yield per plant (SY). The analyzed stability parameters such as Cultivar superiority, Finlay-Wilkinson, Shukla, Static Stability, and Wricke's Ecovalence ranked the tested accessions differently, confirming the importance of using a combination of stability parameters when evaluating the performance of a group of accessions. GGE biplot of the SY trait accounted for 60.79% of sums of squares of the GE interaction and showed that cool and high rainfall environments are ideal for testing the agronomic performance of tolerant accessions. The GGE biplot of SY showed that IG4605(19), IG195(6), and IG156635(12) were specifically adapted to one mega environment, whereas IG70056(38) was identified as a superior line having a high and stable yield. These lines should be included in lentil crossing programs to develop herbicide-tolerant cultivars adapted to diverse environments.

Raffinose Family Oligosaccharides: Friend or Foe for Human and Plant Health?

Raffinose family oligosaccharides (RFOs) are widespread across the plant kingdom, and their concentrations are related to the environment, genotype, and harvest time. RFOs are known to carry out many functions in plants and humans. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of RFOs, including their beneficial and anti-nutritional properties. RFOs are considered anti-nutritional factors since they cause flatulence in humans and animals. Flatulence is the single most important factor that deters consumption and utilization of legumes in human and animal diets. In plants, RFOs have been reported to impart tolerance to heat, drought, cold, salinity, and disease resistance besides regulating seed germination, vigor, and longevity. In humans, RFOs have beneficial effects in the large intestine and have shown prebiotic potential by promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria reducing pathogens and putrefactive bacteria present in the colon. In addition to their prebiotic potential, RFOs have many other biological functions in humans and animals, such as anti-allergic, anti-obesity, anti-diabetic, prevention of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and cryoprotection. The wide-ranging applications of RFOs make them useful in food, feed, cosmetics, health, pharmaceuticals, and plant stress tolerance; therefore, we review the composition and diversity of RFOs, describe the metabolism and genetics of RFOs, evaluate their role in plant and human health, with a primary focus in grain legumes.

High-Temperature and Drought Stress Effects on Growth, Yield and Nutritional Quality with Transpiration Response to Vapor Pressure Deficit in Lentil.

High temperature and water deficit are among the major limitations reducing lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) yield in many growing regions. In addition, increasing atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD) due to global warming causes a severe challenge by influencing the water balance of the plants, thus also affecting growth and yield. In the present study, we evaluated 20 lentil genotypes under field conditions and controlled environments with the following objectives: (i) to investigate the impact of temperature stress and combined temperature-drought stress on traits related to phenology, grain yield, nutritional quality, and canopy temperature under field conditions, and (ii) to examine the genotypic variability for limited transpiration (TRlim) trait in response to increased VPD under controlled conditions. The field experiment results revealed that high-temperature stress significantly affected all parameters compared to normal conditions. The protein content ranged from 23.4 to 31.9%, while the range of grain zinc and iron content varied from 33.1 to 64.4 and 62.3 to 99.3 mg kg-1, respectively, under normal conditions. The grain protein content, zinc and iron decreased significantly by 15, 14 and 15% under high-temperature stress, respectively. However, the impact was more severe under combined temperature-drought stress with a reduction of 53% in protein content, 18% in zinc and 20% in iron. Grain yield declined significantly by 43% in temperature stress and by 49% in the combined temperature-drought stress. The results from the controlled conditions showed a wide variation in TR among studied lentil genotypes. Nine genotypes displayed TRlim at 2.76 to 3.51 kPa, with the genotypes ILL 7833 and ILL 7835 exhibiting the lowest breakpoint. Genotypes with low breakpoints had the ability to conserve water, allowing it to be used at later stages for increased yield. Our results identified promising genotypes including ILL 7835, ILL 7814 and ILL 4605 (Bakria) that could be of great interest in breeding for high yields, protein and micronutrient contents under high-temperature and drought stress. In addition, it was found that the TRlim trait has the potential to select for increased lentil yields under field water-deficit environments.

Prevalence and types of preanalytical error in hematology laboratory of a tertiary care hospital in South India.

BACKGROUND: An important component of laboratory medicine is preanalytical phase. Since laboratory report plays a major role in patient management, more importance should be given to the quality of laboratory tests. AIM: The present study was undertaken to find the prevalence and types of preanalytical errors at a tertiary care hospital in South India. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In this cross-sectional study, a total of 118,732 samples ([62,474 outpatient department [OPD] and 56,258 inpatient department [IPD]) were received in hematology laboratory. These samples were analyzed for preanalytical errors such as misidentification, incorrect vials, inadequate samples, clotted samples, diluted samples, and hemolyzed samples. RESULTS: The overall prevalence of preanalytical errors found was 513 samples, which is 0.43% of the total number of samples received. The most common preanalytical error observed was inadequate samples followed by clotted samples. Overall frequencies (both OPD and IPD) of preanalytical errors such as misidentification, incorrect vials, inadequate samples, clotted samples, diluted samples, and hemolyzed samples were 0.02%, 0.05%, 0.2%, 0.12%, 0.02%, and 0.03%, respectively. CONCLUSION: The present study concluded that incorrect phlebotomy techniques due to lack of awareness is the main reason for preanalytical errors. This can be avoided by proper communication and coordination between laboratory and wards, proper training and continuing medical education programs for laboratory and paramedical staffs, and knowledge of the intervening factors that can influence laboratory results.

Current knowledge in lentil genomics and its application for crop improvement.

Most of the lentil growing countries face a certain set of abiotic and biotic stresses causing substantial reduction in crop growth, yield, and production. Until-to date, lentil breeders have used conventional plant breeding techniques of selection-recombination-selection cycle to develop improved cultivars.These techniques have been successful in mainstreaming some of the easy-to-manage monogenic traits. However, in case of complex quantitative traits, these conventional techniques are less precise. As most of the economic traits are complex, quantitative, and often influenced by environments and genotype-environment interaction, the genetic improvement of these traits becomes difficult. Genomics assisted breeding is relatively powerful and fast approach to develop high yielding varieties more suitable to adverse environmental conditions. New tools such as molecular markers and bioinformatics are expected to generate new knowledge and improve our understanding on the genetics of complex traits. In the past, the limited availability of genomic resources in lentil could not allow breeders to employ these tools in mainstream breeding program.The recent application of the next generation sequencing and genotyping by sequencing technologies has facilitated to speed up the lentil genome sequencing project and large discovery of genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. Currently, several linkage maps have been developed in lentil through the use of expressed sequenced tag (EST) derived simple sequence repeat (SSR) and SNP markers.These maps have emerged as useful genomic resources to identify quantitative trait loci imparting tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses in lentil. In this review, the current knowledge on available genomic resources and its application in lentil breeding program are discussed.

Accurate inference of shoot biomass from high-throughput images of cereal plants.

With the establishment of advanced technology facilities for high throughput plant phenotyping, the problem of estimating plant biomass of individual plants from their two dimensional images is becoming increasingly important. The approach predominantly cited in literature is to estimate the biomass of a plant as a linear function of the projected shoot area of plants in the images. However, the estimation error from this model, which is solely a function of projected shoot area, is large, prohibiting accurate estimation of the biomass of plants, particularly for the salt-stressed plants. In this paper, we propose a method based on plant specific weight for improving the accuracy of the linear model and reducing the estimation bias (the difference between actual shoot dry weight and the value of the shoot dry weight estimated with a predictive model). For the proposed method in this study, we modeled the plant shoot dry weight as a function of plant area and plant age. The data used for developing our model and comparing the results with the linear model were collected from a completely randomized block design experiment. A total of 320 plants from two bread wheat varieties were grown in a supported hydroponics system in a greenhouse. The plants were exposed to two levels of hydroponic salt treatments (NaCl at 0 and 100 mM) for 6 weeks. Five harvests were carried out. Each time 64 randomly selected plants were imaged and then harvested to measure the shoot fresh weight and shoot dry weight. The results of statistical analysis showed that with our proposed method, most of the observed variance can be explained, and moreover only a small difference between actual and estimated shoot dry weight was obtained. The low estimation bias indicates that our proposed method can be used to estimate biomass of individual plants regardless of what variety the plant is and what salt treatment has been applied. We validated this model on an independent set of barley data. The technique presented in this paper may extend to other plants and types of stresses.

Quantifying the three main components of salinity tolerance in cereals.

Salinity stress is a major factor inhibiting cereal yield throughout the world. Tolerance to salinity stress can be considered to contain three main components: Na(+) exclusion, tolerance to Na(+) in the tissues and osmotic tolerance. To date, most experimental work on salinity tolerance in cereals has focused on Na(+) exclusion due in part to its ease of measurement. It has become apparent, however, that Na(+) exclusion is not the sole mechanism for salinity tolerance in cereals, and research needs to expand to study osmotic tolerance and tissue tolerance. Here, we develop assays for high throughput quantification of Na(+) exclusion, Na(+) tissue tolerance and osmotic tolerance in 12 Triticum monococcum accessions, mainly using commercially available image capture and analysis equipment. We show that different lines use different combinations of the three tolerance mechanisms to increase their total salinity tolerance, with a positive correlation observed between a plant's total salinity tolerance and the sum of its proficiency in Na(+) exclusion, osmotic tolerance and tissue tolerance. The assays developed in this study can be easily adapted for other cereals and used in high throughput, forward genetic experiments to elucidate the molecular basis of these components of salinity tolerance.