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- Author or Editor: I. Ahmad x
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The dynamical fluctuations of biological signals provide a unique window to construe the underlying mechanism of the biological systems in health and disease. Recent research evidences suggest that a wide class of diseases appear to degrade the biological complexity and adaptive capacity of the system. Heart rate signals are one of the most important biological signals that have widely been investigated during the last two and half decades. Recent studies suggested that heart rate signals fluctuate in a complex manner. Various entropy based complexity analysis measures have been developed for quantifying the valuable information that may be helpful for clinical monitoring and for early intervention. This study is focused on determining HRV dynamics to distinguish healthy subjects from patients with certain cardiac problems using symbolic time series analysis technique. For that purpose, we have employed recently developed threshold based symbolic entropy to cardiac inter-beat interval time series of healthy, congestive heart failure and atrial fibrillation subjects. Normalized Corrected Shannon Entropy (NCSE) was used to quantify the dynamics of heart rate signals by continuously varying threshold values. A rule based classifier was implemented for classification of different groups by selecting threshold values for the optimal separation. The findings indicated that there is reduction in the complexity of pathological subjects as compared to healthy ones at wide range of threshold values. The results also demonstrated that complexity decreased with disease severity.
Use of plant hormones as seed priming agents is known to improve the field performance especially under stressful conditions like salinity. A pot experiment was conducted to study the effects of seed priming of two wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) cultivars Auqab-2000 (salt tolerant) and MH-97 (salt sensitive) under saline (15 dS m−1) and non-saline (2.75 dS m−1) conditions. For priming seeds were soaked in aerated water (hydropriming), and solutions of kinetin (Kin; 25 mg L−1), or salicylic acid (SA; 50 mg L−1) for 12 h. All the priming treatments significantly reduced the adverse effects of salinity in terms of improving final emergence, growth and grain yield of both cultivars. Seed priming with SA and Kin improved salt tolerance in both wheat cultivars by the activation of antioxidants, i.e. superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) to counterbalance the oxidative damage. Albeit, Na+ and Cl− contents increased due to salinity, all priming strategies lowered the accumulation of Na+ and enhanced the accumulation of K+ in leaves of both cultivars. The results suggest that priming with SA followed by kinetin successfully improved fitness of wheat plants exposed to salt stress.
A panel of 94 diverse hexaploid wheat accessions was used to map quantitative trait loci (QTL) underlying the yield related traits on chromosome 3A. Population structure and kinships were estimated using unlinked SSR markers from all 21 chromosomes. Analysis of variance revealed significant difference among accessions; however, genotype × year interaction was non-significant for majority of yield related traits. A mixed linear model (MLM) approach identified six QTLs for four traits that individually accounted for 10.7 to 17.3% phenotypic variability. All QTLs were consistently observed for both study years. New putative QTLs for the maximum fertile florets per spike and spike length were identified. This report on QTLs for yield related traits on chromosome 3A will extend the existing knowledge and may prove useful in marker-assisted selection (MAS) for development of high yielding cultivars.
