This book covers recent advances in cyanobacterial research. It deals with diversity, evolutionary biology, stress physiology, molecular biology of stress responses, and biotechnology of this group of prokaryotes. Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous and, undoubtedly, agriculturally microorganisms in terms of carbon and nitrogen fixation. In addition, cyanobacteria have long been used to fertilize crops and are a source of protein for humans. In parallel with the advances in cyanobacterial research in the 21st century, the development and application of innovative techniques in molecular biotechnology has widened the spectrum of commercial applications and potential exploitation of cyanobacteria. This book will be of interest to both new and experienced researchers involved in cyanobacterial molecular biology, ecology, and industrial biotechnology. This collection of chapters from experts also serves as essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students of to understand the importance of cyanobacteria in agriculture, ecology, microbial physiology, and environmental sciences.

The sugarcane crop, one of the most important crops commercially grown in about 115 countries of the world, faces a number of problems, such as low cane productivity, biotic and abiotic stresses, high cost of cultivation, postharvest losses, and low sugar recovery. This volume addresses these issues and provides a comprehensive account of the major advancements in sugarcane research. The book is compilation of recent achievements in sugarcane development and cultivation. It covers a number of improvements made in cane and sugar yield using both conventional and new biotechnological approaches by agricultural scientists and researchers. The comprehensive coverage includes sustainable sugarcane cultivation, development, and management of sugarcane production, covering farming and biotechnology, entomology, pathology, breeding, physiology, biotechnology, agronomy, seed production, and more. It also presents research on modern crop production methods in a comprehensive and easily understood manner. With chapters from expert researchers from internationally renowned institutes (primarily in India), the volume presents the latest information from the literature at the international level to make it usable to many agroecological regions of the world. It will be a valuable resource for agronomists, breeders, plant physiologists, farmers, and students of agricultural sciences.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the basic and advanced metabolic engineering technologies used to generate natural metabolites and industrially important biomolecules. Metabolic engineering has the potential to produce large quantities of valuable biomolecules in a renewable and sustainable manner by extending or modifying biosynthetic pathways in a wide range of organisms. It has been successfully used to produce chemicals, drugs, enzymes, amino acids, antibiotics, biofuels, and industrially important pharmaceuticals. The book comprehensively reviews the various metabolites detection, extraction and biosensors and the metabolic engineering of microbial strains for the production of industrially useful enzymes, proteins, organic acids, vitamins and antibiotics, therapeutics, chemicals, and biofuels. It also discusses various genetic engineering and synthetic biology tools for metabolic engineering. In closing, the book discusses ethical, patenting and regulatory issues in the metabolic engineering of microbes. This book is a valuable source not only for beginners in metabolic engineering, but also students, researchers, biotechnology and metabolic engineering based company.

Currently, it is a serious concern to manage waste in the environment. Therefore, detailed knowledge of heavy metals, their eco-toxicological and health effects and ecofriendly approaches for their immobilization and detoxification is urgently required to control and minimize the environmental pollution. Composting is one of the popular methods in waste management and there are a lot of issues pertaining to composting. One of it is the leaching of heavy metals. This book discusses thoroughly, the availability, leachability and the speciation of heavy metals in the entire process of composting.

This book presents the latest developments in bioinformatics, highlighting the importance of bioinformatics in genomics, transcriptomics, metabolism and cheminformatics analysis, as well as in drug discovery and development. It covers tools, data mining and analysis, protein analysis, computational vaccine, and drug design. Covering cheminformatics, computational evolutionary biology and the role of next-generation sequencing and neural network analysis, it also discusses the use of bioinformatics tools in the development of precision medicine. This book offers a valuable source of information for not only beginners in bioinformatics, but also for students, researchers, scientists, clinicians, practitioners, policymakers, and stakeholders who are interested in harnessing the potential of bioinformatics in many areas.

Policy Issues in Genetically Modified Crops: A Global Perspective contains both theoretical and empirical evidence of a broad range of aspects of GM crop policies throughout the world. Emphasizing world agriculture production and ethics of GM crops, the book balances insights into the various discussions around the use of GM crops including soil health, effects on animals, environmental sustainability impact, and ethical issues. The book presents aspects of GM crop policies and prevailing controversies throughout the world, in 5 sections containing 23 chapters. Beginning with the discussion of the policies related to GM crops, the book dives deep into issues related to food insecurity, agricultural sustainability, food safety, and environmental risks. Section 5 also captures the recent advances in agricultural biotechnology encompassing research trends, the nano-biotech approach to plant genetic engineering, and other transformation techniques in crop development. The contributors of the book represent different backgrounds, providing a holistic overview of diverse approaches and perspectives. Policy Issues in Genetically Modified Crops: A Global Perspective is a valuable resource for researchers in agricultural policy and economics, agricultural biotechnology, soil science, genetic engineering, ethics, environmental management, sustainable development, and NGOs.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the basic and advanced metabolic engineering technologies used to generate natural metabolites and industrially important biomolecules. Metabolic engineering has the potential to produce large quantities of valuable biomolecules in a renewable and sustainable manner by extending or modifying biosynthetic pathways in a wide range of organisms. It has been successfully used to produce chemicals, drugs, enzymes, amino acids, antibiotics, biofuels, and industrially important pharmaceuticals. The book comprehensively reviews the various metabolites detection, extraction and biosensors and the metabolic engineering of microbial strains for the production of industrially useful enzymes, proteins, organic acids, vitamins and antibiotics, therapeutics, chemicals, and biofuels. It also discusses various genetic engineering and synthetic biology tools for metabolic engineering. In closing, the book discusses ethical, patenting and regulatory issues in the metabolic engineering of microbes. This book is a valuable source not only for beginners in metabolic engineering, but also students, researchers, biotechnology and metabolic engineering based company.

PGPR Amelioration in Sustainable Agriculture: Food Security and Environmental Management explores the growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) that are indigenous to soil and plant rhizosphere. These microorganisms have significant potential as important tools for sustainable agriculture. PGPR enhance the growth of root systems and often control certain plant pathogens. As PGPR amelioration is a fascinating subject, is multidisciplinary in nature, and concerns scientists involved in plant heath and plant protection, this book is an ideal resource that emphasizes the current trends of, and probable future of, PGPR developments. Chapters incorporate both theoretical and practical aspects and may serve as baseline information for future research. This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers, both in universities and research institutes, especially working in areas of agricultural microbiology, plant pathology and agronomy.

There are no limits to science. Each advance merely widens the sphere of exploration. Many a times the operator is confronted with situations where direct restoration are not feasible nor advisable because of extensive loss of tooth structure and /or need to modify or change the present occlusion . Keeping teeth is important for many functions, such as eating and speech, whilst in our present society good esthetics are a high priority for the majority of people. Dental care must also be designed to prevent any future problems and to help to maintain this healthy environment. This area of dentistry crosses many of the traditional departments that exist in teaching hospitals throughout the world and includes the disciplines of peridontology, operative dentistry, endodontics, fixed and removable prosthodontics.

Advances in Cyanobacterial Biology presents the novel, practical, and theoretical aspects of cyanobacteria, providing a better understanding of basic and advanced biotechnological application in the field of sustainable agriculture. Chapters have been designed to deal with the different aspects of cyanobacteria including their role in the evolution of life, cyanobacterial diversity and classification, isolation, and characterization of cyanobacteria through biochemical and molecular approaches, phylogeny and biogeography of cyanobacteria, symbiosis, Cyanobacterial photosynthesis, morphological and physiological adaptation to abiotic stresses, stress-tolerant cyanobacterium, biological nitrogen fixation. Other topics include circadian rhythms, genetics and molecular biology of abiotic stress responses, application of cyanobacteria and cyanobacterial mats in wastewater treatments, use as a source of novel stress-responsive genes for development of stress tolerance and as a source of biofuels, industrial application, as biofertilizer, cyanobacterial blooms, use in Nano-technology and nanomedicines as well as potential applications. This book will be important for academics and researchers working in cyanobacteria, cyanobacterial environmental biology, cyanobacterial agriculture and cyanobacterial molecular biologists.

Continuous use of chemical fertilizers resulted reduced soil and water quality. So, use of biofertilizers should be adopted which have multiple beneficial impacts on soil and convenient in use.The production cost of carrier based inoculants is high as it is energy and labour intensive process as mining, drying etc. and have poor shelf life.Liquid inoculants with greater shelf life may provide a solution over these problems. Liquid inoculants are special formulations of viable cells of desired microorganisms in an appropriate nutrient medium with certain protectant chemicals which promote cell survival in formulations during storage and after seed or soil application. Studies were conducted to develop suitable growth media for liquid inoculants of Mesorhizobium sp. and Pseudomonas sp., to examine the Shelf life and effect of nutrient stresses on survival of these organisms under laboratory and field conditions. Survival of Mesorhizobium sp. and Pseudomonas sp. was found maximum in YEM-2 and NB-1 with Optimum levels of C and N. Shelf life of liquid inoculants was found greater than carrier based inoculants. This study is useful for researchers, farmers and biofertilizer industries.

In texture classification the goal is to assign an unknown sample texture image to one of a set of known texture classes.Important applications include industrial and bio medical surface inspection, for example for defects and disease, ground classification and segmentation of satellite or aerial imagery, segmentation of textured regions in document analysis, and content-based access to image databases. However, despite many potential areas of application for texture analysis in industry there is only a limited number of successful examples. A major problem is that textures in the real world are often not uniform, due to changes in orientation, scale or other visual appearance. In addition, the degree of computational complexity of many of the proposed texture measures is very high.A wide variety of techniques for describing image texture have been proposed in literature. This work is an analysis of texture image classification in different classifier under two different features called wavelet and statistical. The result shows that image classification with wavelet feature and feed forward neural network gives better result.

As we know almost all routing protocols are centralized in nature. Some of the major matrices or parameters used by routing protocols are hop count, bandwidth, delay, load, and reliability. These parameters are suitable for infrastructure based networks. But in Ad hoc Networks we require some efficient distributed and parallel routing approach. This makes route discovery process more reliable and provides high degree of link availability. Main objective of this research work is to propose a more efficient distributed route discovery process, using node mobility as parameter. This proposed algorithm is also compared with some centralized routing algorithms. We have evaluated this algorithm on the basis of Quality of Service parameters.

There are a very large number of plants which contain compounds lethal to terrestrial as well as aquatic pests at doses which are some times below those for synthetic pesticides. Use of such products has the additional advantage that these likely to cause contamination of the environment. After all, such compounds are not confined to the plants in which they are found but also possibly get distributed in the environment through air and water. Most of the studies have been done in this area however suffer from one common drawback. While there is much information on the toxicity and lethal doses of plant pesticides, very little literature is available on their mode of action and affect on non-target organisms. For a large number of plants, data from field studies is lacking. Obviously these, substance cannot be put to commercial use without a study of these aspects as well. The freshwater snail Lymnaea acuminata and Indoplanorbis exustus are commonly found in Northern part of India. These snails are intermediate host of liver flukes Fasciola hepatica and Fasciola gigantica, which causes endemic fascioliasis in cattle and live stock population in this region.

End-stage renal disease (ESRD) is an emerging healthcare problem worldwide, but is fairly acute in developing countries like India. Malnutrition is one of the major hurdles in long term survival of dialysis patients, and it is recommended to initiate dialysis before malnutrition sets in. Serum Leptin is increased in ESRD and maybe responsible for Anorexia-Malnutrition syndrome. Studies by researchers across the globe have produced evidence of both 'in-favor' and 'against' the topic of increase in Serum Leptin causing malnutrition in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients on maintenance hemodialysis. This book documents the original study by the authors to assess the correlation of Serum Leptin with Body Mass Index (a biomarker for malnutrition) in ESRD patients on maintenance hemodialysis in India.

Unequal power relations and lack of autonomy characterize the situation of married women in many settings; the autonomy of married young women is particularly constrained. In many countries in South Asia and the Middle East, early and arranged marriages are the norm and in most cases, the young woman scarcely knows her husband and is not involved in marriage-related decision-making. Worldwide, at least one woman in three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime (JHU, 1999). Many young women are faced with the challenge of saying no to unprotected sex, especially when dependent economically and socially on their male partners. The fear of violent consequences contributes to the absence of any negotiating position for protected sex (Development studies Network, 2000). This study tries to explore the young married women's perception on sexual and reproductive rights, gender roles and husband's behavior and its association with their experiences of sexual & physical violence and health problems.

Glaucoma is a condition of the eye in which the optic nerve is damaged due to increased fluid pressure in the eye. Left untreated, the condition may lead to permanent blindness. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging test that uses light waves to take cross-section pictures of the retina, the light-sensitive tissue lining the back of the eye (geteyesmart.org). OCT is commonly used in the evaluation of patients with glaucoma. This manual is a concise guide to the use of OCT for the diagnosis of glaucoma. Beginning with an introduction to OCT, the book then provides in depth discussion on its use in glaucoma. Each of the following chapters describes the use of OCT for analysing associated parts of the eye, including the optic nerve, retinal nerve and ganglion cell, as well as macular and anterior segment OCT. The advantages and common pitfalls in OCT imaging and its interpretation are discussed at length. Key points Concise guide to OCT for diagnosis and evaluation of glaucoma Explains use of OCT for analysis of associated parts of the eye In depth discussion of advantages and common pitfalls in OCT imaging Includes more than 115 images and illustrations

The sugarcane crop, one of the most important crops commercially grown in about 115 countries of the world, faces a number of problems, such as low cane productivity, biotic and abiotic stresses, high cost of cultivation, postharvest losses, and low sugar recovery. This volume addresses these issues and provides a comprehensive account of the major advancements in sugarcane research. The book is compilation of recent achievements in sugarcane development and cultivation. It covers a number of improvements made in cane and sugar yield using both conventional and new biotechnological approaches by agricultural scientists and researchers. The comprehensive coverage includes sustainable sugarcane cultivation, development, and management of sugarcane production, covering farming and biotechnology, entomology, pathology, breeding, physiology, biotechnology, agronomy, seed production, and more. It also presents research on modern crop production methods in a comprehensive and easily understood manner. With chapters from expert researchers from internationally renowned institutes (primarily in India), the volume presents the latest information from the literature at the international level to make it usable to many agroecological regions of the world. It will be a valuable resource for agronomists, breeders, plant physiologists, farmers, and students of agricultural sciences.

Abatement of Environmental Pollutants: Trends and Strategies addresses new technologies and provides strategies for environmental scientists, microbiologists and biotechnologists to help solve problems associated with the treatment of industrial wastewater. The book helps readers solve pollution challenges using microorganisms in bioremediation technologies, including discussions on global technologies that have been adopted for the treatment of industrial wastewater and sections on the lack of proper management. Moreover, limited space, more stringent waste disposal regulations and public consciousness have made the present techniques expensive and impractical. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop sustainable management technologies for industries and municipalities. To remove the damaging effect of organic pollutants on the environment, various new technologies for their degradation have been recently discovered.