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Toxocariasis is a paramount parasitic disease having 50% prevalence among newborn buffalo calves in Bangladesh. The objective of this study was to compare the efficacy of clinically used anthelmintics and their subsequent effect on the haematological parameters and body weight in buffalo calves in commercial buffalo farms in coastal region. Thirty-two buffalo calves below 3 months of age with clinical

Sodium (Na) and arsenic (As) toxicity were monitored by hyperaccumulation of metals in Salvinia natans L. with 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) induction. Salvinia was recorded with significant bioaccumulation of those metals with de-folding of cellular attributes in sustenance under toxic environment. 2,4-D priming has revised the growth components like net assimilation rate and relative water content to register initial plants' survival against Na and As. Proline biosynthesis supported in the maintenance of osmotic adjustment and plants sustained better activity through subdued electrolytic leakage. Oxidative stress due to both Na and As exposure is responsible for induction under significant moderation of lipid peroxidation and protein carbonization by 2,4-D application was evident to release the stress from metal and metalloids. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) like superoxide and hydrogen peroxide accumulation were monitored with activity of NADP(H)-oxidase. However, it was downregulated by 2,4-D to check the oxidative damages. Superoxide dismutase and peroxidases were significantly moderated to reduce the oxidative degradation for both metals with 2,4-D induction. Glutathione metabolism and recycling of ascorbate with monodehydroascorbate activity were other features to maintain the redox homeostasis for metal toxicity. At the molecular level, polymorphic variations of concern genes in redox cascades demarked significantly for those two metals and established the biomarker for those metals, respectively. As a whole, the biocompatibility of auxin herbicide in Salvinia may raise the possibility for auxin metabolism and thereby, the bioaccumulation to Na and As vis-à-vis tolerance for ecological safety is established.

Wheat blast caused by the hemibiotroph fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae Triticum (MoT) pathotype is a destructive disease of wheat in South America, Bangladesh and Zambia. This study aimed to determine and compare the activities of antioxidant enzymes in susceptible (wheat, maize, barley and swamp rice grass) and resistant (rice) plants when interacting with MoT. The activities of reactive oxygen species-detoxifying enzymes; catalase (CAT), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), glutathione peroxidase (GPX), glutathione S-transferase (GST), peroxidase (POX) were increased in all plants in response to MoT inoculation with a few exceptions. Interestingly, an early and very high activity of CAT was observed within 24 h after inoculation in wheat, barley, maize and swamp rice grass with lower H2O2 concentration. In contrast, an early and high accumulation of H2O2 was observed in rice at 48 hai with little CAT activity only at a later stage of MoT inoculation. The activities of APX, GST and POD were also high at an early stage of infection in rice. However, these enzymes activities were very high at a later stage in wheat, barley, maize and swamp rice grass. The activity of GPX gradually decreased with the increase of time in rice. Taken together, our results suggest that late and early inductions of most of the antioxidant enzyme activities occurs in susceptible and resistant plants, respectively. This study demonstrates some insights into physiological responses of host and non-host plants when interacting with the devastating wheat blast fungus MoT, which could be useful for developing blast resistant wheat.

Abiotic stressors such as salinity cause major yield losses in maize (Zea mays). To reduce the impact of salinity and breed for salt tolerance, precise phenotypic screening of maize genotypes at seedling stage is imperative. A laboratory experiment was conducted in the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, Hajee Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University, Dinajpur, Bangladesh during rabi season (November–March) of 2017–18. Twenty maize inbred lines were assessed for salt tolerance at both germination and the seedling stage. The experiment was conducted using a completely randomized block design with three replications and four treatments viz. T0 (0 dS m−1), T1 (5 dS m−1), T2 (10 dS m−1) and T3 (15 dS m−1). The analysis of variance revealed highly significant (p

Growing attention has been paid to greenhouse gases (GHG) viz. carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), due to their contribution to global warming. Biochar is used widely in agricultural soils to improve some soil properties, enhance soil nutrients, and mitigate GHG emissions. However, the previous studies on acidic soils reported contradictory results of CO2, CH4, or N2O emissions due to various factors that vary based on the properties of soil and biochar. The data on the impact of biochar application on GHG emissions in alkaline soils are limited, and because of the alkaline nature of biochar, it is expected to behave similarly as on acidic soil. However, contradictory results are noticed also in the alkaline soils, especially in CO2 and CH4. Therefore, this review gives insight into the contradictory results of CO2, CH4, or N2O emissions as affected by biochar with a special focus on alkaline soils and the potential factors included in this process.

The performance of next-generation, nanoelectronic devices relies on a precise understanding of strain within the constituent materials. However, the increased flexibility inherent to these three-dimensional device geometries necessitates direct measurement of their deformation. Here we report synchrotron x-ray diffraction-based non-destructive nanoscale mapping of Si/SiGe nanosheets for gate-all-around structures. We identified two competing mechanisms at different length scales contributing to the deformation. One is consistent with the in-plane elastic relaxation due to the Ge lattice mismatch with the surrounding Si. The second is associated with the out-of-plane layering of the Si and SiGe regions at a length scale of film thickness. Complementary mechanical modeling corroborated the qualitative aspects of the deformation profiles observed across a variety of nanosheet sample widths. However, greater deformation is observed in the SiGe layers of the nanosheets than the predicted distributions. These insights could play a role in predicting carrier mobilities of future devices.

Salinity has been observed to be a global problem that impede the physiological characteristics of plants. Salicylic acid (SA) as a phytohormone play multifaceted role in plants in terms of development as well as stress management. The current study was conducted to evaluate the effect of salinity and salicylic acid on the performance of wheat and barley plants under field experimentation followed by on-farm study to validate the results. This research was firstly conducted in a 4-year research barley field (2012–2013 and 2013–2014) and wheat (2014–2015 and 2015–2016) and subsequently in an on-farm research in four places (2017–2018). Results depicted that salinity decreased plant yield components and altered ion concentrations (Na+/K+) causing reduced grain and biological yield. However, SA foliar application induced yield components, especially grain number of plants in both years in non-saline and saline conditions. Exogenously SA application not only led to higher grain yield of barley and wheat but also significantly improved their salt tolerance. Our findings revealed that optimum SA concentrations for achieving highest barley yield were 0.85 and 0.78 mM under saline and non-saline conditions, respectively, while on-farm scale studies observed that foliar application of SA increased grain and biological yield of wheat in Ardakan, Ashkzar (saline soil and water) and Mehrabad (non-saline field) regions. There was no significant effect in Tijerd, a completely non-saline field. The grain yields were higher in SA-treated Ardakan, Ashkzar, and Mehrabad plants in field by 19, 16, and 15%, respectively. Based on present detailed studies, it was concluded that SA improved salinity tolerance and increased crop yield. So, optimum concentration (1.0–1.5 mM) with proper time application (double ridges), SA increased wheat and barley yields up to 20%. Therefore, SA priming could be used as a potent strategy to cope up salinity stress from plants.

Cadmium (Cd) is a toxic metal and an environmental pollutant that significantly reduces plant growth and productivity. Proper management can ameliorate dysfunction and improve the plant growth and productivity exposed to Cd. Therefore, the present study was conducted to explore the protective role of the fungicides tebuconazole (TEB) and trifloxystrobin (TRI) in helping wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv. Norin 61) seedlings to tolerate Cd. Five-day-old hydroponically grown seedlings were allowed to mild (0.25 mM CdCl2) and severe (0.5 mM CdCl2) Cd stress separately and with the fungicides (2.75 µM TEB + 1.0 µM TRI) for the next four days. Compared to control, the level of H2O2 in the seedlings exposed to mild and severe Cd stress alone increased by 81 and 112%, respectively. The accumulation of Cd also increased in the wheat seedlings along with declining mineral nutrients under Cd stress. The protective effect of TEB and TRI was observed with the enhancement of the antioxidant defense and methylglyoxalase systems and reduction in oxidative damage. Applying TEB and TRI reduced MDA (by 9 and 18%), EL (by 21 and 17%), MG (by 12 and 17%), and LOX activity (by 37 and 27%), respectively, relative to Cd stress alone. Cadmium uptake also decreased in the shoots (by 48 and 50%, respectively) and roots (by 23 and 25%, respectively) of the fungicide-treated wheat seedlings under mild and severe Cd stress, relative to stress alone. These results indicate the exogenous application of TEB and TRI is a promising approach to improve Cd tolerance in wheat plants. Further investigation is needed under field conditions and for other crop species to determine the Cd-tolerance induced by TEB and TRI application.

5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) modulates various defense systems in plants and confers abiotic stress tolerance. Enhancement of crop production is a challenge due to numerous abiotic stresses such as, salinity, drought, temperature, heavy metals, and UV. Plants often face one or more abiotic stresses in their life cycle because of the challenging growing environment which results in reduction of growth and yield. Diverse studies have been conducted to discern suitable mitigation strategies to enhance crop production by minimizing abiotic stress. Exogenous application of different plant growth regulators is a well-renowned approach to ameliorate adverse effects of abiotic stresses on crop plants. Among the numerous plant growth regulators, 5-aminolevulinic acid (ALA) is a novel plant growth regulator, also well-known to alleviate the injurious effects of abiotic stresses in plants. ALA enhances abiotic stress tolerance as well as growth and yield by regulating photosynthetic and antioxidant machineries and nutrient uptake in plants. However, the regulatory roles of ALA in plants under different stresses have not been studied and assembled systematically. Also, ALA-mediated abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms have not been fully elucidated yet. Therefore, this review discusses the role of ALA in crop growth enhancement as well as its ameliorative role in abiotic stress mitigation and also discusses the ALA-mediated abiotic stress tolerance mechanisms and its limitation and future promises for sustainable crop production.

Unfavorable environmental conditions such as heat, cold, drought, metal/metalloid toxicity, and pathogens enhance production of intra-and inter-cellular levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in plants. ROS, acting as signaling molecules, activate signal transduction pathways in response to various stresses. Alternatively, ROS cause irreversible cellular damage due to lipid peroxidation, oxidation of protein, inactivation of enzymes, DNA damage, and interact with other vital constituents of plant cells through their strong oxidative properties, which drastically alter plant morphological structures, becoming disadvantageous for survival and productivity. Higher plants have complex defense systems to scavenge ROS. Being a central molecule of the defense system, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) is ubiquitous from prokaryotes to eukaryotes cells. GABA helps mitigate ROS in plants and GABA shunt pathway plays a key role either as metabolites or endogenous signaling molecules in several regulatory mechanisms under stress conditions. The GABA transporters (GATs) being activated with the attachment of GABA under environmental stress stimuli facilitate high content of Ca2+ into the cytosol. Ca2+ combines with calmodulin (CaM) -binding domain that activates the glutamate decarboxylase (GAD) enzyme for the conversion of glutamate into GABA. This synchronized process regulates GABA shunt gene expressions under stress conditions and improves defense mechanisms in plants. This review highlights the regulatory aspects of GABA shunt pathway for ROS production as well as in the defense mechanism of plants.

In today’s competitive business world, customer service is often at the heart of businesses that can help strengthen their brands. Resolution of customers’ complaints in a timely and efficient manner is key to improving customer satisfaction. Moreover, customers’ complaints play an important role in identifying their requirements which offer a starting point for effective and efficient planning of companies’ overall R&D and new product or service development activities. Having said that, organizations encounter challenges towards automatically identifying complaints buried deep in massive online content. Our current work centers around learning two closely related tasks, viz. complaint identification and sentiment classification. We leverage weak supervision to annotate the corpus with sentiment labels. We propose a deep multitask framework that features a knowledge element that uses AffectiveSpace to infuse commonsense knowledge specific features into the learning process. The framework models complaint identification (the primary task) and sentiment classification (supplementary task) simultaneously. Experimental results show that our proposed multitask system obtains the highest cross-validation accuracy of 83.73 +/- 1.52 % for the complaint identification task and 69.01 +/- 1.74 % for the sentiment classification task. Our proposed multitask system outperforms the single-task systems indicating a strong correlation between sentiment analysis and complaint classification tasks, thus benefiting from each other when learned concurrently.

To examine the rain-fed Aman rice yield fluctuation due to climatic anomalies overtimes in Bangladesh, we used climate-induced yield index (CIYI), ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), step-wise multiple regression, isotopic signature, wavelet transform coherence (WTC) and random forest (RF) model. In this work, daily multiple source climatic data which were collected between 1980 and 2017, from 18 weather stations and five atmospheric circulation indices were used for this purpose. The key findings were as follows; by employing principal component analysis (PCA), six temporal variability modes were identified as six corresponding sub-regions with various Aman rice CIYI fluctuations. The Aman rice CIYI in different sub-regions represented a noteworthy 3–4-year quasi-oscillation using the EEMD. The key climate variables (KCVs) including the potential evapotranspiration and cloud cover in September, the minimum temperature in August, and precipitation in July, August, and October were the best rice yield prediction signals in these sub-regions. The results suggest that Aman rice yield could likely decline by 33.59%, and 3.37% in the southwestern and southeastern regions, respectively, if KCV increased by 1 °C or 1%. The RF model suggests that the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) significantly influenced the rice yield. Isotopic signatures were employed to confirm the fluctuation and anti-amount effect during the Aman rice-growing period in Bangladesh. The results obtained in this study could be used as a guideline for sustainable mitigation and adaptation measures in managing agro-meteorological hazards in Bangladesh.

Cuticular waxes are the covering of the outer layer of the plant, consist of hydrocarbon appears like whitish film or bloom in plant organs. They play a vital role like a safeguard from different stress condition in the plant. Since environmental factors are active regulators of cuticular wax biosynthesis, composition, quantity, and deposition, it is evident that cuticular wax is associated with plant stress responses. The diversity of cuticular wax compositions is a proof of the wealth of genes associated in plant wax production. Moreover, a number of wax genes were distinguished in plant/crops at abiotic stress conditions but, regulation of control of those wax genes has not been studied very well in major crop plants at abiotic conditions. A very few transcriptions factors were identified to regulate the expression level of wax genes of cuticular wax biosynthesis at abiotic stress condition. However, further study is needed to identify more candidate transcriptional regulation factors to cuticular wax production in different crop plants in diverse abiotic environments. Therefore, regulation of cuticular wax production under diverse abiotic stresses and the role of transcription factors into the plant cuticular wax accumulation will be helpful to engineer crop plants and improve transgenic crops for stress tolerance. In this review, we focused on a new perspective on transcriptional factors to regulate functional genes of cuticular wax biosynthesis in plants at abiotic stresses.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. The appraisal of household vulnerability and capacity to adapt under climate change is therefore crucial for developing effective disaster risk reduction policies. This study explored the nexus between vulnerability and capacity of rural drought-prone households using survey data of 400 respondents from northern Bangladesh. Through extensive rigorous literature review, 22 and 25 indicators were employed to develop the vulnerability and capacity index, respectively. Co-occurrence network analysis was employed to show the nexus among different classes of capacity and vulnerability. Spearman correlation was also performed to analyze the nexus between vulnerability and capacity. The results reveal that households’ vulnerability varies across livelihood assets (human, social, financial, physical, and natural), but capacity follows a similar distribution pattern. A significant negative association was found between vulnerability and adaptive capacity, whereas the strong correlations between social and human capital, human and financial capital, social and financial capital, and physical and natural capital were identified in this study. Future projection (up to 2024) using support vector machine algorithm shows that overall drought adaptive capacity will increase, while vulnerability will decrease. The outcomes of this study would help planners and policy-makers in planning and taking proper initiatives that might be useful for adopting efficient disaster risk reduction strategies.

Cotton-sunflower cropping system is a unique oilseed-based rotation. The real problem is overlapping sunflower-maturity with cotton-sowing. Investigations aim to tackle cotton-late-sowing through sowing-time-adjustment and cultivar-selection at cropping-system-level. Cotton (May 10th to June 24th) and sunflower (December 20th to February 03rd) sowing-dates were maintained biweekly. Maturity-time based cultivars were selected (early, medium, late) and variations in ambient-temperature through sowing-dates from 33.2 to 33.9 °C, 32.2 to 33.6 °C and 29.2 to 32.6 °C, length of emergence-squaring, squaring-flowering and flowering-maturity differed by 3.1, 1.5 and 5.1 days, respectively. Likewise, sunflower-sowing-dates based ambient-temperature ranged 13.7–18.1 °C, 16.3–17.5 °C and 23.8–28.5 °C at emergence-budding, budding-anthesis and anthesis-maturity, resulted in a difference of 13.5, 4.8 and 1.0 days. Results revealed that cotton late-sowing (May 10th to June 24th) and sunflower (December 20th to January 19th) resulted in reduces seedcotton, lint and achene yield by 19.9, 8.2 and 8.8 kg ha−1 day−1. Oil productivity was the highest in cotton vide June 24th and in sunflower 04th January. In this cropping system, cotton is highly sensitive to sowing-dates for yield losses (35%) and sunflower less sensitive (14.4%). Meanwhile, yield variations in cotton-cultivars (12.5%) and sunflower-hybrids (10.0%). It was realized that sunflower December 20th hold great importance to assure minimum cotton yield-losses than looking for hybrids.

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) originate as a natural byproduct in standard metabolism of oxygen activities. The principal sites of ROS generation in the cell are apoplast, mitochondria, chloroplasts, and peroxisomes. These ROS can induce cellular injuries by proteins oxidation, lipid peroxidation, and DNA damage, which finally may result in plant cellular death. Under regular circumstances, there is a steadiness between generation and elimination of ROS, but this balance is hampered by different biotic and abiotic stress factors such as exposure to heavy metals, high and low-light conditions, pathogens, insects and temperature extremes, resulting in a high generation of ROS which should be counteracted by the antioxidant machinery in cells. The antioxidant system of defense is composed by two groups: (i) Enzymatic antioxidants such as superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), ascorbate peroxidase (APX), general peroxidases (PRX) (e.g. guaiacol peroxidase GPX), glutathione reductase (GR), monodehydroascorbate reductase (MDHAR), and dehydroascorbate reductase (DHAR); (ii) Non-enzymatic antioxidants such as ascorbic acid (AA), reduced glutathione (GSH), α-tocopherol, carotenoids, plastoquinone/ubiquinone and flavonoids. These two groups of metabolites and enzymes work together with the main aim of ROS scavenging, but also in determining plant signaling, immune response, and plant growth and development. Finally, the molecular genetics of ROS genes and related metabolic pathways are briefly outlined, including gene isoforms, cellular localization, detection methods used and interactions amongst them. This information is crucial in better understanding and designing procedures for plants´stress tolerance; leading to a better management of agricultural plants under challenging and changing climatic conditions and food security.