The placenta establishes a maternal–fetal exchange interface to transport nutrients and gases between the mother and the fetus. Establishment of this exchange interface relies on the development of multinucleated syncytiotrophoblasts (SynT) from trophoblast progenitors, and defect in SynT development often leads to pregnancy failure and impaired embryonic development. Here, we show that mouse embryos with conditional deletion of transcription factors GATA2 and GATA3 in labyrinth trophoblast progenitors (LaTPs) have underdeveloped placenta and die by ~embryonic day 9.5. Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis revealed excessive accumulation of multipotent LaTPs upon conditional deletion of GATA factors. The GATA factor–deleted multipotent progenitors were unable to differentiate into matured SynTs. We also show that the GATA factor–mediated priming of trophoblast progenitors for SynT differentiation is a conserved event during human placentation. Loss of either GATA2 or GATA3 in cytotrophoblast-derived human trophoblast stem cells (human TSCs) drastically inhibits SynT differentiation potential. Identification of GATA2 and GATA3 target genes along with comparative bioinformatics analyses revealed that GATA factors directly regulate hundreds of common genes in human TSCs, including genes that are essential for SynT development and implicated in preeclampsia and fetal growth retardation. Thus, our study uncovers a conserved molecular mechanism, in which coordinated function of GATA2 and GATA3 promotes trophoblast progenitor-to-SynT commitment, ensuring establishment of the maternal–fetal exchange interface.

In this paper, the Homotopy Analysis Method (HAM) is implemented to obtain the approximate solutions of a nonlinear system of ordinary differential equations such as the obesity epidemic model. The convergence theorem of HAM for the model as well as the regions of convergence derived from the gcurves are demonstrated. In addition, an optimal convergence control parameter has been determined. Numerical simulations of the model are carried out using MATLAB and then compared with the results of the Runge-Kutta (RK) method. The simulation results show that if the adult population follow ahealthy lifestyle and physical exercises, it reduces the progression of becoming overweight and obese. The graphs and the tables exhibit the simplicity and the reliability of the method. (c) 2024 L&H Scientific Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.

BackgroundConcurrent existence of lncRNA and circular RNA at both nucleus and cytosol within a cell at different proportions is well reported. Previous studies showed that circular RNAs are synthesized in nucleus followed by transportation across the nuclear membrane and the export is primarily defined by their length. lncRNAs primarily originated through inefficient splicing and seem to use NXF1 for cytoplasm export. However, it is not clear whether circularization of lncRNA happens only in nucleus or it also occurs in cytoplasm. Studies indicate that circular RNAs arise when the splicing apparatus undergoes a phenomenon of back splicing. Minor spliceosome (U12 type) mediated splicing occurs in cytoplasm and is responsible for the splicing of 0.5% of introns of human cells. Therefore, possibility of cRNA biogenesis mediated by minor spliceosome at cytoplasm cannot be ruled out. Secondly, information on genes transcribing both circular and lncRNAs along with total number of RBP binding sites for both of these RNA types is extractable from databases. This study showed how these apparently unconnected pieces of reports could be put together to build a model for exploring biogenesis of circular RNA.ResultsAs a result of this study, a model was built under the premises that, sequences with special semantics were molecular precursors in biogenesis of circular RNA which occurred through catalytic role of some specific RBPs. The model outcome was further strengthened by fulfillment of three logical lemmas which were extracted and assimilated in this work using a novel data analytic approach, Integrated Cellular Geography. Result of the study was found to be in well agreement with proposed model. Furthermore this study also indicated that biogenesis of circular RNA was a post-transcriptional event.ConclusionsOverall, this study provides a novel systems biology based model under the paradigm of Integrated Cellular Geography which can assimilate independently performed experimental results and data published by global researchers on RNA biology to provide important information on biogenesis of circular RNAs considering lncRNAs as precursor molecule. This study also suggests the possible RBP-mediated circularization of RNA in the cytoplasm through back-splicing using minor spliceosome.

The high-power radio frequency source for ion cyclotron heating and current drive of ITER tokamak consists of two identical 1.5 MW amplifier chains. These two chains will be combined using a wideband hybrid combiner with adequate coupling flatness, phase balance, return loss, and isolation response to generate 2.5 MW radio frequency (RF) power in the frequency range of 36 to 60 MHz. As part of the in-house development program at ITER-India, a wideband hybrid combiner with coupling flatness and return loss/isolation better than 0.4 and -25 dB, respectively, has been simulated. A detailed analysis for matched load performance of the hybrid combiner for the output power level of 3 MW as well as mismatched load performance for load power of 2.5 MW with voltage standing wave ratio 2.0 and 3.0 MW with voltage standing wave ratio 1.5 has been performed. Based on the simulation, a prototype model was in-house fabricated, and the simulated results have been validated experimentally in splitter and combiner mode. To evaluate performance as a combiner, two solid-state power amplifiers were combined through the prototype combiner for input power levels up to 2.5 kW on matched and mismatched load conditions. In the power splitter experiment, the RF power level up to 1.5 MW from a single amplifier chain was split through the prototype combiner to be dumped in the high power loads in the frequency range of 36 to 60 MHz.

Healthy progression of human pregnancy relies on cytotrophoblast (CTB) progenitor self-renewal and its differentiation toward multinucleated syncytiotrophoblasts (STBs) and invasive extravillous trophoblasts (EVTs). However, the underlying molecular mechanisms that fine-tune CTB self-renewal or direct its differentiation toward STBs or EVTs during human placentation are poorly defined. Here, we show that Hippo signaling cofactor WW domain containing transcription regulator 1 (WWTR1) is a master regulator of trophoblast fate choice during human placentation. Using human trophoblast stem cells (human TSCs), primary CTBs, and human placental explants, we demonstrate that WWTR1 promotes self-renewal in human CTBs and is essential for their differentiation to EVTs. In contrast, WWTR1 prevents induction of the STB fate in undifferentiated CTBs. Our single-cell RNA sequencing analyses in first-trimester human placenta, along with mechanistic analyses in human TSCs revealed that WWTR1 fine-tunes trophoblast fate by directly regulating WNT signaling components. Importantly, our analyses of placentae from pathological pregnancies show that extreme preterm births (gestational time ≤28 wk) are often associated with loss of WWTR1 expression in CTBs. In summary, our findings establish the critical importance of WWTR1 at the crossroads of human trophoblast progenitor self-renewal versus differentiation. It plays positive instructive roles in promoting CTB self-renewal and EVT differentiation and safeguards undifferentiated CTBs from attaining the STB fate.

SrSnO3 is a potential candidate for the perovskite-structured transparent electrode for many optoelectronic devices, especially for recently developed perovskite solar cells. La-doped SrSnO3 thin films were deposited using pulsed laser deposition on SrTiO3 (STO) substrate to study its structural and electrical properties. This study reveals that Lanthanum is a promising dopant for SrSnO3. Results of the Rutherford backscattering experiment showed that the oxygen vacancies are increasing with strain on La doping. X-ray diffraction measurements revealed the increase in strain with La-doping which was the reason for the increase in oxygen vacancies. The charge-neutrality was maintained within the films by the reduction of Sn4+ to Sn2+. The coexistence of two tin charge states (4+ and 2+) facilitated the hopping mechanism of the conduction. It was observed that La-doping reduced the electrical resistivity by 7 orders of magnitude with no significant change in its structure. Results obtained from X-ray absorption spectra are also consistent with these results.

Due to continuous growth in population and sharp increase in energy and food demand, research on alternative energy sources independent of fossil fuels has increased over the last decade. Moreover, limitations on greenhouse gas emissions by developed and developing countries are imposing much pressure on the energy sector worldwide to use renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal. Food production is one of the biggest industries in the world, and it consumes a large amount of energy in the form of heat and electricity. In this work, agro-product drying technologies powered by solar energy are presented and discussed. Different types of solar dryers based on direct, indirect and mixed modes are described. Moreover, energy, exergy, economic, and environmental analyses for these technologies are presented to determine the main parameters affecting the dryer performance. The results indicate that the air mass flow rate, temperature, moisture content, and drying time are the most important parameters in solar dryer performance. Finally, a comparative assessment of the performance of different existing solar dryer has been highlighted with a detail scope of future works.

Out of currently available semi-automatic tools for detecting diagnostic probes relevant to a pathophysiological condition, ArrayMining and GEO2R of NCBI are most popular. The shortcomings of ArrayMining and GEO2R are that both tools list the probes ordering them on the basis of their individual statistical level of significances with only difference of statistical methods used by them. While the latest tool GEO2R outputs either top 250 or all genes following its own ranking mechanism, ArrayMining requires number of probes to be inputted by the user. This study provided a way for automatic selection of probe-set that can be obtained from the voting of outputs resulted from statistical methods, t-Test, Mann-Whitney Test and Empirical Bayes Moderated t-test. It was also intriguing to find that the parameters of these statistical methods can be represented as a mathematical function of group fisher's discriminant ratio of a disease-control expression data-pair. Result of this fully automatic method, APT shows 88.97 percent success in comparison to 80.40 and 87.60 percent successes of ArrayMining and GEO2R respectively to include reported probes. Furthermore, out of 10 fold cross validation and 5 new test cases, APT shows a better performance than both ArrayMining and GEO2R in regards to sensitivity and specificity.

Protein sequence is a wealth of experimental information which is yet to be exploited to extract information on protein homologues. Consequently, it is observed from publications that dynamic programming, heuristics and HMM profile-based alignment techniques along with the alignment free techniques do not directly utilize ordered profile of physicochemical properties of a protein to identify its homologue. Also, it is found that these works lack crucial bench-marking or validation in absence of which their incorporation in search engines may appears to be questionable. In this direction this research approach offers fixed dimensional numerical representation of protein sequences extending the concept of periodicity count value of nucleotide types (2017) to accommodate Euclidean distance as direct similarity measure between two proteins. Instead of bench-marking with BLAST and PSI-BLAST only, this new similarity measure was also compared with Needleman–Wunsch and Smith–Waterman. For enhancing the strength of comparison, this work for the first time introduces two novel benchmarking methods based on correlation of “similarity scores” and “proximity of ranked outputs from a standard sequence alignment method” between all possible pairs of search techniques including the new one presented in this paper. It is found that the novel and unique numerical representation of a protein can reduce computational complexity of protein sequence search to the tune of O (log( n )). It may also help implementation of various other similarity-based operation possible, such as clustering, phylogenetic analysis and classification of proteins on the basis of the properties used to build this numerical representation of protein.

In this paper, we broaden the utilization of a beautiful computational scheme, residual power series method (RPSM), to attain the fractional power series solutions of nonhomogeneous and homogeneous nonlinear time-fractional systems of partial differential equations. This paper considers the fractional derivatives of Caputo-type. The approximate solutions of given systems of equations are calculated through the utilization of the provided initial conditions. This iterative scheme generates the fast convergent series solutions with conveniently determinable components. The implementation of this numerical scheme clearly exhibits its effectiveness, reliability and easiness regarding the procedure of the solution, as well as its better approximation. The repercussions of the fractional order of Caputo derivatives on solutions are depicted through graphical presentations for various particular cases.

This research paper implements the fractional homotopy analysis transform technique to compute the approximate analytical solution of the nonlinear three-species food chain model with time-fractional derivatives. The offered technique is a fantastic blend of homotopy analysis method (HAM) and Laplace transform (LT) operator and has been used fruitfully in the numerical computation of various fractional differential equations (FDEs). This paper involves the fractional derivatives of Caputo style. The numerical solutions of this selected fractional-order food chain model are evaluated by making use of the associated initial conditions. It is revealed by the adopting procedure that the more desirable estimation of the solution can be easily acquired through the calculation of some number of iteration terms only — a fact which authenticates the easiness and soundness of the suggested hybrid scheme. The variations of fractional order of time derivative on the solutions for different specific cases have been depicted through graphical presentations. The outcomes demonstrated through the graphs expound that the adopted scheme is very fantastic and accurate.

In this paper, we present an application of the homotopy perturbation transform method to compute the approximate analytical solution of the nonlinear fractional order computer virus propagation (CVP) model. The fractional derivatives are used in Caputo sense. The proposed approximate method generates the numerical solution in the shape of a rapid convergent series by utilizing the provided initial conditions. The main purpose of the paper is to analyze the effect of variation of fractional order alpha on the meeting time of susceptible, infected and recovered computers. Moreover, the local stability analysis of the fractional order computer virus model is also presented using Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A field experiment was conducted during Kharif 2018 at Crop Research Farm, Department of Agronomy, SHUATS, Prayagraj, (U.P.). The soil of experimental plot was sandy loam in texture, nearly neutral in soil reaction (pH 6.7), low in organic carbon (0.35%), available N (230 kg ha-1), available P (20 kg ha-1) and available K (189 kg ha-1). The experiment consist of 4 levels of Zinc (0, 5, 10, 15 ha-1) and Boron applied as foliar at (0.0%, 0.3%, 0.5% ha-1).There were 12 treatments replicated thrice and lead out in a random block design. Application of 15 kg Zn ha ha-1 applied as Basel in combination with Boron at 5% recorded maximum no. of grains cob-1 (647.80), test weight (25.14)and green cob yield (5.94 t).Hence gross return (127956.00 INR), net return(71508.00 INR)and B:C ratio (1.26) was also recorded in the aforesaid treatment.