Bio Technology

Cryptococcus is an encapsulated yeast, ubiquitous in nature. The concept of using differential media for isolating specific fungal pathogens is not new. The present study reveals that all plant based media are found to be supporting the confluent growth of Cryptococcus neoformans, Lowsonia inermis (Henna) leaf based media, Brassica campestris (Mustard) seed based media and Rhus cotinus (Smoke tree) leaf based media exhibits appreciable brown color effect (BCE) which makes them a good option as selective media for Cryptococcus neoformans. Not only plant based agar media, the plant based broths also supported confluent growth of this organism. This is perhaps the first report. Thus, these plant based media are selective, simple to prepare and economical to use and offers a novel alternative for currently available synthetic media.

The use of fossil fuels as energy is now broadly accepted as unsustainable due to depleting resources and also due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the environment. To resolve this problem use of renewable energy is now in focus, renewable energy plays a crucial role in dealing with energy security, eco-friendliness and climate change issues at global and national level. Renewable energy continued to grow strongly in 2012 in both OECD and non-OECD countries. This paper reviews the global growth of renewable energy and present renewable energy status in India, with the main focus on algal biofuel and its future prospects in India.

Primary clarified bone waste (PCBW) from ossein factory was anaerobically co-digested with cattle dung in relative proportions at ambient temperature. A substitution of PCBW (60%) with cattle dung (40%) reported herein to be appropriate for a maximum biogas production yield with 68-71% methane content. The pH of the slurry was intensively maintained until the course of digestion. The best degradation of organic matter was achieved at a low proportion of PCBW used in the digesters. Thus, co-digestion of PCBW and cattle dung at a moderate proportion is a more noteworthy for producing maximum biogas yield with high quality methane content and to control odor in ossein factory.

Different node splitting criteria are available for the construction of classification and regression trees. Two of these criteria i.e. Gini and Twoing criterion have been implemented in CART (Salford systems, 1995), Entropy function in C4.5 (Quinlan, 1993) etc. These criteria provide similar results especially for the small number of categories but not for large. To overcome this problem, we proposed a new node splitting method for the construction of classification trees. The performance of the new method is compared with conventional methods using two real life datasets and it is observed that the new method gives better results in terms of misclassification and deviance.

Bioinformatics is a science typically associated with databases in genomics and proteomics and structure and Function information for genes and proteins, of all forms of life on earth. In the past decade there has been a ‘cyber-war’, with the introduction of a number of biological databases on genomics and proteomics. The major aim here is to introduce data mining techniques as an automated means of reducing the complexity of biological data in large bioinformatics databases and of discovering meaningful, useful patterns and relationships in data. The main purpose of data mining in the field of bioinformatics is the mining of complex data which is fast growing and can be said to be outgrowing our processing power.

Biochemical studies of the individual plant parts is a necessary prerequisite in order to evaluate their importance in the over all metabolism of the plant. In the present study various plant parts of selected 15 medicinal plants were evaluated, separately for their metabolite content. Maximum amount of total soluble sugars and lipids were present in S.emarginatus, starch in D.indica, protein in P.niruri and phenols in A.squamosa. The seeds of all the experimental plants showed more content of metabolites as compared to the other plant parts.

The marine biosphere is one of the richest habitats of microorganisms. Marine microbes particularly bacteria are considered for their secondary metabolites and enzymes with novel properties. The Marine Soil Microbial isolates were screened for potential producers of L-asparagines using a phenol red indicator and growth medium. The isolates were characterized by biochemical tests and found to belong to Bacillus sp. We performed random amplification of polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis on five strain of Bacillus sp. Random primers were used for the PCR. Electrophoresis on denaturing acrylamide gels improved RAPD reproducibility and increased the band number. The primer of OPU series gave reproducible results and band profiles.

Surface soils representing a wide range of pH, EC and OC in Sundarbans were studied to determine the relationships between microbial growth efficiency and soil properties besides temperature changes. The field study shows that bacterial and fungal growth efficiency are maximum (100 %) in November and in January and minimum (9 -21 %) in April and May months respectively. Regression analysis indicates that pH, EC and OC besides temperature accounted for most of the variability in efficiency of microbial population over 85%. Multiple regression analysis predicted the growth efficiency of bio inoculates in different soil conditions in Sundarbans. Further field study shows that the application of Azotobactor increases tomato yield 2.5-20.4 % and chilli yield 2.1-16.1 % over balanced 75% NPK doses. These percentage of increases yield of tomato and chilli are highly statistical significant (r= 0.975 and r= 0.961 respectively) with bacterial growth efficiency. Increases of percentage of tomato and chilli yield on Azotobactor application based on bacterial growth efficiency depending on soil properties in Sundarbans is also predicted from regression equation. Soil and temperature requirements for microbial growth efficiency are tabulated according to Sys et al. (1993) from regression equation.

In this work the antibacterial activity of several steroid derivatives (compounds 1, 2 and 3)againstE. coli,S. Typhi,K. pneumoniae and S. aureuswas performed according to NCCLS (now CLSI)²² with some modifications. The results indicate that compounds 1, 2 and 3 induce antibacterial activity against both K. pneumoniaeand S. Typhiin a dose-dependent way.In addition, the growth bacterial of E. coliwas inhibited in presence of the compound 2 and 3. These experimental data obtained in this study, suggest that antibacterial activity of steroid derivatives against to E. coli, K. pneumoniae, V. cholerae and S. tiphy may depend of chemical structure.

The aim of this study to determine the prevalence of multidrug resistance in Acinetobacter species, these are ubiquitous Gram-negative bacteria widespread in nature .They live in soil and water. They utilize a wide variety of carbon and other energy sources and grow well on routine lab media. Originally known as antibiosis, antibiotics were drugs that had action against bacteria. Acinetobacter strain which was isolated from blood, pus and urine was collected from different hospital lab. It was further confirmed to be Acinetobacter using various biochemical test and observing the growth in the Mcconkey agar medium .Also it is found that ESBL strains are weak bio film producers, hence spread these organisms are restricted by bio film production. In quantitative assay by observing the OD at 600nm,the rate of bio film production was observed .This results strongly correlates with qualitative assay .Finally the ESBL strain was subjected to plasmid isolated ,separated using Agarose Gel and the gel was documented .The molecular weight was recorded to be 14000 kb by comparing with the marker protein.