Web enabled paddy disease detection using Compressed Sensing.

In agricultural industry, paddy diseases play a vital role to cause economic losses. Hence, the detection of diseases of paddy plants and give suggestions to the peasants is beneficial to increase the yield quantity of rice. In this paper, a novel web-based paddy disease detection using Compressed Sensing is proposed to detect and classify paddy diseases. First, the diseased leaf is pre-processed using contrast enhancement, and then LAB color space is applied. The segmentation is done using K-Means clustering. The storage complexity is reduced using the Compressed Sensing technique. The segmented leaf images are compressed and then uploaded to the cloud. In the transmitter section, the Compressed Sensing recovery algorithm is used to reconstruct the segmented image. Then Statistical Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) method is used to extract the features from the segmented image. Support Vector Machine classifier is used to classify the diseases. The performance of the proposed method is compared with other existing techniques. The proposed system is also experimentally tested with Arduino board. The proposed system achieves the disease recognition rate of 98.38%.

A thermostable bacterial cocaine esterase rapidly eliminates cocaine from brain in nonhuman primates.

A long-acting, thermostable bacterial cocaine esterase (CocE) has been identified that rapidly degrades cocaine with a K(M) of 1.33+0.085 µM. In vivo evaluation of CocE has shown protection against convulsant and lethal effects of cocaine in rodents, confirming the therapeutic potential of CocE against cocaine overdose. However, the current study is the first to evaluate the effects of CocE on cocaine brain levels. Positron emission tomogrpahy neuroimaging of [(11)C]cocaine was used to evaluate the time course of cocaine elimination from brain in the presence and absence of CocE in nonhuman primates. Systemic administration of CocE eliminated cocaine from the rhesus-monkey brain approximately three times faster than control conditions via peripheral actions through attenuating the input function from blood plasma. The efficiency of this process is sufficient to alleviate or prevent adverse central nervous system effects induced by cocaine. Although the present study used tracer doses of cocaine to access brain clearance, these findings further support the development of CocE for the treatment of acute cocaine toxicity.

A tiered barcode authentication tool to differentiate medicinal Cassia species in India.

DNA barcoding is a desirable tool for medicinal product authentication. DNA barcoding is a method for species identification using short DNA sequences that are conserved within species, but variable between species. Unlike animals, there is no single universal DNA barcode locus for plants. Coding markers, matK and rbcL, and noncoding markers, trnH-psbA (chloroplast) and ITS2 (nuclear), have been reported to be suitable for the DNA barcoding of plants with varying degree of success. Sixty-four accessions from 20 species of the medicinal plant Cassia were collected, and analyzed for these 4 DNA barcoding markers. PCR amplification was 100% successful for all 4 markers, while intra-species divergence was 0 for all 4 Cassia species in which multiple accessions were studied. Assuming 1.0% divergence as the minimum requirement for discriminating 2 species, the 4 markers could only differentiate 15 to 65% of the species studied when used separately. Adding indels to the divergence increased the percentage of species discrimination by trnH-psbA to 90%. In 2-locus barcoding, while matK+rbcL (which is recommended by Consortium for the Barcoding of Life) discriminated 90% of the species, the other combinations of matK+ITS and rbcL+trnH-psbA showed 100% species discrimination. However, matK is plagued with primer issues. The combination of rbcL+trnH-psbA provided the most accurate (100% species ID) and efficient tiered DNA barcoding tool for the authentication of Cassia medicinal products.