Prevalence and distribution of Salmonella serotypes in marketed broiler chickens and processing environment in Coimbatore City of southern India

Broiler chicken is gaining popularity among the consumers of India. Since poultry is recognised as a leading food vehicle for Salmonella contamination, the prevalence and distribution of Salmonella serotypes in broiler chickens and processing environments of retail outlets has been studied. In the present study 214 samples of broiler chicken and 311 environmental samples from cage were analysed for the presence of Salmonella. Of the various body parts of live chicken analysed prevalence varied from 1.4% in cloacca to 6.9% in crop region. Environmental samples from the cage showed higher prevalence of Salmonella ranging from0 to 16.67%. Apart from Salmonella enteritidis, which was the predominant Salmonella serotype in the chickens as well as in the environmental samples, other serotypes such as S. bareilly, S. cerro, S. mbandaka and S. moladewere also encountered. The results of the research calls for strict hygiene standards for retail broiler chicken processing outlets

Truncated VP28 as oral vaccine candidate against WSSV infection in shrimp: An uptake and processing study in the midgut of Penaeus monodon

Several oral vaccination studies have been undertaken to evoke a better protection against white spot syndrome virus (WSSV), amajor shrimp pathogen. Formalin-inactivated virus andWSSV envelope protein VP28 were suggested as candidate vaccine components, but their uptake mechanism upon oral delivery was not elucidated. In this study the fate of these components and of live WSSV, orally intubated to black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) was investigated by immunohistochemistry, employing antibodies specific for VP28 and haemocytes. The midgut has been identified as the most prominent site of WSSV uptake and processing. The truncated recombinant VP28 (rec-VP28), formalin-inactivated virus (IVP) and live WSSV follow an identical uptake route suggested as receptor-mediated endocytosis that starts with adherence of luminal antigens at the apical layers of gut epithelium. Processing of internalized antigens is performed in endo-lysosomal compartments leading to formation of supra-nuclear vacuoles. However, the majority of WSSV-antigens escape these compartments and are transported to the inter-cellular space via transcytosis. Accumulation of the transcytosed antigens in the connective tissue initiates aggregation and degranulation of haemocytes. Finally the antigens exiting the midgut seem to reach the haemolymph. The nearly identical uptake pattern of the different WSSV-antigens suggests that receptors on the apical membrane of shrimp enterocytes recognize rec-VP28 efficiently. Hence the truncated VP28 can be considered suitable for oral vaccination, when the digestion in the foregut can be bypassed

Processing And Frozen Storage Characteristics Of Ray Fillets

Rays, belonging to the class Elasmobranchii, constitute a major fishery in many states in India like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Maharashtra. The estimated landings are 21,700 tonnes per annum. Even though the meat of rays is nutritious and free from bones and spines, there is little demand for fresh meat due to the presence of a high urea content. The landings are mainly used for salt curing which fetches only very low prices for the producers. Urea nitrogen constituted the major component (50.8%) of the non-protein nitrogen of the meat. An attempt has been made to standat-dize the processing steps to reduce the urea levels in the meat before freezing by using different simple techniques like dipping the fillets in stagnant chilled water, dipping in chilled running water and dipping in stirred chilled running water. It was found that meat dipped in stirred running water for two hours reduced the urea level of the meat by 62%. The yield of the lateral fin fillets and caudal fin fillets vary with the size of the ray. The drip loss during frozen storage is found to be more in the case of samples frozen stored after the treatment for urea removal by the method of stirring in running water. The samples treated in stagnant chilled water had the lowest drip loss. The total nitrogen was higher in samples treated in stagnant chilled water and lowest in the samples treated in stirred running water. The overall acceptability was high in the case of samples treated with stirred running water and frozen stored

A System for Offline Recognition of Handwritten Characters in Malayalam Script

In this paper, we propose a handwritten character recognition system for Malayalam language. The feature extraction phase consists of gradient and curvature calculation and dimensionality reduction using Principal Component Analysis. Directional information from the arc tangent of gradient is used as gradient feature. Strength of gradient in curvature direction is used as the curvature feature. The proposed system uses a combination of gradient and curvature feature in reduced dimension as the feature vector. For classification, discriminative power of Support Vector Machine (SVM) is evaluated. The results reveal that SVM with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel yield the best performance with 96.28% and 97.96% of accuracy in two different datasets. This is the highest accuracy ever reported on these datasets

Spectral clustering independent component analysis for tissue classification from brain MRI

A spectral angle based feature extraction method, Spectral Clustering Independent Component Analysis (SC-ICA), is proposed in this work to improve the brain tissue classification from Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). SC-ICA provides equal priority to global and local features; thereby it tries to resolve the inefficiency of conventional approaches in abnormal tissue extraction. First, input multispectral MRI is divided into different clusters by a spectral distance based clustering. Then, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is applied on the clustered data, in conjunction with Support Vector Machines (SVM) for brain tissue analysis. Normal and abnormal datasets, consisting of real and synthetic T1-weighted, T2-weighted and proton density/fluid-attenuated inversion recovery images, were used to evaluate the performance of the new method. Comparative analysis with ICA based SVM and other conventional classifiers established the stability and efficiency of SC-ICA based classification, especially in reproduction of small abnormalities. Clinical abnormal case analysis demonstrated it through the highest Tanimoto Index/accuracy values, 0.75/98.8%, observed against ICA based SVM results, 0.17/96.1%, for reproduced lesions. Experimental results recommend the proposed method as a promising approach in clinical and pathological studies of brain diseases

Using Neural Network Classifier Support Vector Machine Regression for the prediction of Melting Point of Drug – like compounds

In our study we use a kernel based classification technique, Support Vector Machine Regression for predicting the Melting Point of Drug – like compounds in terms of Topological Descriptors, Topological Charge Indices, Connectivity Indices and 2D Auto Correlations. The Machine Learning model was designed, trained and tested using a dataset of 100 compounds and it was found that an SVMReg model with RBF Kernel could predict the Melting Point with a mean absolute error 15.5854 and Root Mean Squared Error 19.7576

Valorization of date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) fruit processing by-products and wastes using bioprocess technology – Review

The date palm Phoenix dactylifera has played an important role in the day-to-day life of the people for the last 7000 years. Today worldwide production, utilization and industrialization of dates are continuously increasing since date fruits have earned great importance in human nutrition owing to their rich content of essential nutrients. Tons of date palm fruit wastes are discarded daily by the date processing industries leading to environmental problems. Wastes such as date pits represent an average of 10% of the date fruits. Thus, there is an urgent need to find suitable applications for this waste. In spite of several studies on date palm cultivation, their utilization and scope for utilizing date fruit in therapeutic applications, very few reviews are available and they are limited to the chemistry and pharmacology of the date fruits and phytochemical composition, nutritional significance and potential health benefits of date fruit consumption. In this context, in the present review the prospects of valorization of these date fruit processing by-products and wastes’ employing fermentation and enzyme processing technologies towards total utilization of this valuable commodity for the production of biofuels, biopolymers, biosurfactants, organic acids, antibiotics, industrial enzymes and other possible industrial chemicals are discussed

Natural Rubber Latex Filler Masterbatch by Soap Sensitised Coagulation-Preparation, Processing and Evaluation

Sensitisation of natural rubber latex by addition of a small quantity of an anionic surfactant prior to the addition of a coacervant results in quick coagulation. The natural rubber prepared by the novel coagulation method shows improved raw rubber characteristics, better cure characteristics in gum and carbon black filled compounds and improved mechanical properties as compared to the conventionally coagulated natural rubber. Compounds based on dried masterbatches prepared by the incorporation of fluffy carbon black in different forms of soap sensitised natural rubber latices such as fresh latex, preserved field latex, centrifuged latex and a blend of preserved field latex and skim latex show improved cure characteristics and vucanizate properties as compared to an equivalent conventional dry rubber-fluffy carbon black based compound. The latex masterbatch based vulcanizates show higher level of crosslinking and better dispersion of filler. Vulcanizates based on fresh natural rubber latex- dual filler masterbatches containing a blend of carbon black and silica prepared by the modified coagulation process shows very good mechanical and dynamic properties that could be correlated to a low rolling resistance. The carbon black/silica/nanoclay tri-filler - fresh natural rubber latex masterbatch based vulcanizates show improved mechanical properties as the proportion of nanoclay increased up to 5 phr. The fresh natural rubber latex based carbon black-silica masterbatch/ polybutadiene blend vulcanizates show superior mechanical and dynamic properties as compared to the equivalent compound vulcanizates prepared from the dry natural rubber-filler (conventional dry mix)/polybutadiene blends

Improved Biometric Authentication System Using Multimodal Cue Integration

Biometrics is an efficient technology with great possibilities in the area of security system development for official and commercial applications. The biometrics has recently become a significant part of any efficient person authentication solution. The advantage of using biometric traits is that they cannot be stolen, shared or even forgotten. The thesis addresses one of the emerging topics in Authentication System, viz., the implementation of Improved Biometric Authentication System using Multimodal Cue Integration, as the operator assisted identification turns out to be tedious, laborious and time consuming. In order to derive the best performance for the authentication system, an appropriate feature selection criteria has been evolved. It has been seen that the selection of too many features lead to the deterioration in the authentication performance and efficiency. In the work reported in this thesis, various judiciously chosen components of the biometric traits and their feature vectors are used for realizing the newly proposed Biometric Authentication System using Multimodal Cue Integration. The feature vectors so generated from the noisy biometric traits is compared with the feature vectors available in the knowledge base and the most matching pattern is identified for the purpose of user authentication. In an attempt to improve the success rate of the Feature Vector based authentication system, the proposed system has been augmented with the user dependent weighted fusion technique.