Bose Institute (Basu Bigyan Mandir) is a public research institute of India and also one of its oldest. The Institute was established in 1917 by Acharya Sir Jagdish Chandra Bose, the father of modern scientific research in the Indian subcontinent. Bose was its Director for the first twenty years till his demise. Debendra Mohan Bose, who succeeded Nobel Laureate Sir CV Raman as Palit Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta, was the Director of Bose Institute for the next thirty years. The Institute pioneered the concept of interdisciplinary research in Asia and India in sync with global trends. The Institute pioneered the concept of interdisciplinary research in Asia and India in sync with global trends.
Biofertilizers used in saleable formulations perform poorly in cold Himalayan regions owing to the suppressed metabolic activity of bioinoculants under low temperatures. Cold-adapted Actinobacteria, as potent plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR), emerge as viable cold-active bioinoculants for sustainable nutrient management in high-altitude crop cultivation. This perspective aims to document the Actinobacterial metabolic diversity in the glacier bionetwork lying in the North-Eastern and North-Western Himalayan region. A comparative functional bioinformatics study of plant growth-promoting genes demonstrated distinct clustering of Himalayan versus non-Himalayan strains, driven by alanine/aspartate/glutamate metabolism, geraniol degradation, and pyruvate metabolism. This pioneering genomic differentiation of Himalayan actinomycetes from other cold habitats highlights unique cold-tolerance and plant growth-promoting factors that may target particular functionality for crop cultivation in the extreme glacier environment.
A Trans-Himalayan lake-desert ecosystem was explored for the low-to-high temperature adaptations of copiotrophic psychrophiles having potentials for substantive carbon remineralization under natural and/or anthropogenically-influenced conditions of high organic matter delivery to the environment. Overall 27 bacterial species were isolated from the brackish-water and sediment-surface of Tso Moriri (a massive lake on the Changthang plateau that remains frozen for approximately one third of the year), and the fine talus covering a lake-side rocky mountain. In Luria broth (LB), all isolates grew at 4 °C and 15 °C; at -10 °C, 13 could grow while others remained only metabolically-active. Catabolizing different complex-organic-compounds, all isolates achieved considerable growth at 4 °C; 20 accomplished low growth at -10 °C. LB-based growth dwindled with rising temperature: 23, 11, and none of the isolates grew at 28 °C, 37 °C, and 42 °C respectively. In agar-overlay assays, most actinobacterial isolates inhibited other mesophilic bacteria. The isolates’ genomes, and their habitats’ metagenomes, encompassed diverse genes for extreme-temperature adaptation, carbohydrate catabolism, antibiosis and antibiotic-resistance. All in-vitro findings collectively engender the following hypothesis, via contextual inferences pending field-study-based validations. Warming-induced cessation of organotrophic growth, within high-altitude cryospheres, would curb the production of simple-fatty-acids, CO2 and N2O. Short-supply of acetate and CO2 would, in turn, cut-back methanogenesis. Such negative-feedback control of greenhouse gas production at the micro-habitat level can add-up in the biome-scale to mitigate broader environmental warming; it, however, endangers the ecosystem from thermally-better-adapted foreign microbes that can usher positive-feedback cycles of warming. In the latter scenario, antibiosis potentials of native actinobacteria become pivotal to microbiome protection.
To develop management strategies to control human-induced air pollutants, it is important to examine the chemical species that influence PM2.5 concentrations and to quantify PM2.5 concentrations in urban environments. The present study examined the 24h average PM2.5 levels from July 2018 to December 2019 at three locations in the Indian Himalayan Region: Darjeeling, Almora, and Mohal-Kullu. During the measurement period, the average mass concentrations of PM2.5 were as follows: Mohal-Kullu, 39 ± 21 (range: 13–98 µg m−3); Almora, 27 ± 18 (range: 11–109 µg m−3); and Darjeeling, 38 ± 13 µg m−3 (range: 16–89 µg m−3). A significant positive correlation among NH4+, SO42−, NO3−, and Cl− in PM2.5 at the p < 0.05 significance level indicated formation of secondary inorganic aerosols (SIA) at the study sites. PMF 5.0 identified three to five major sources over the study sites: fossil fuel combustion, secondary aerosols, vehicular emissions, soil dust, and biomass burning. In Darjeeling, the five dominant sources were coal combustion (26
The insecticidal crystal protein derived from gram positive soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis plays an important role in controlling lepidopteran infestation. The present study seeks to protect chickpea plants from Helicoverpa armigera infestation by over expressing cry1Ac. Homologous Ubiquitin and RuBisCO small subunit (rbcS) promoters were used to transcribe cry1Ac in transgenic chickpea both constitutively and in a tissue specific manner through Agrobacterium mediated transformation of chickpea var. ICCV89314. Expressed Cry1Ac was specifically targeted to the chloroplast rich tissues using transit peptide sequence. After monitoring transgene integration by Southern hybridization, transgenic chickpea lines were further analyzed by western blot, ELISA and insect bioassay. Expression of cry1Ac in chickpea under the control of above two promoters conferred a high level of protection against pod borer infestation, where chloroplast targeting system was found to be more efficient in controlling this particular devastating lepidopteran pest.
In this study, a single-mask triple gas electron multiplier (GEM) prototype, operated with an Ar/CO _2 (70/30) mixture, was characterised using a ^55 Fe X-ray source. Detector efficiency, gain, energy resolution and stability under high radiation were investigated, with particular focus on efficiency stability, providing insights into reliable GEM operation.
