Isolation of Phosphate Solubilizing Bacteria from White Lupin (Lupinus albus L.) Rhizosphere Soils Collected from Gojam, Ethiopia

Phosphorus is one of the least available and the least mobile mineral nutrients in soil for plant growth. However, it is vital for plants and they absorb only inorganic form of phosphorous but the level of inorganic phosphorus is very low in soil because most of the phosphorous is present as insoluble forms. Unlike nitrogen, there is no large atmospheric source that can be made biologically available to plants. P chemical fertilizer is widely applied in agricultural production. However, a large proportion of these fertilizers are also converted to insoluble form leads to low-fertilizer efficiency where the volume of phosphatic fertilizers as low as 15-20% are only utilized by plants due to fixation of P in acidic and alkaline soils.

Phosphorus deficiency is the most important problem of Ethiopian soils and more than 70-75% of highland soils are characterized by phosphorus deficiency. Around 70% of Ethiopian vertisols have available phosphorus below 5 ppm, which is very low for supporting good plant growth; and, fixation in vertisols is related more to calcium, than Al3+ and Fe3+. Yield is usually low under traditional farming system because of poor cultural practices that is compounded with poor soil fertility.

Life-Cycle Assessment of Neonicotinoid Pesticides

Insecticides are a class of pesticides used to kill, harm, or repel different species of insects. They act in different ways in organisms based on their active ingredients. For instance, corn plantations commonly use insecticides that have organophosphates and carbamate as the active ingredient, which acts on the enzyme acetylcholinesterase within an insect nervous system. In many cases, these standard insecticide products are being phased out for a new class of insecticide known as neonicotinoids, which use nicotine as the active ingredient. Neonicotinoid compounds interact withnicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR) of the central nervous systems ofinsects. Nicotine acts in an insect’s system in the same way that it acts in the human body. However, neonicotinoids are more toxic for invertebrates than they are to mammals, birds and other higher organisms.

Neonicotinoids became popular because of their high water solubility, which makes their soil application travel through the entire plant. Nowadays, neonicotinoids are one of the most widely used class of insecticides for controlling sucking insects and soil insects. In 2004, the worldwide annual usage of neonicotinoids was approximately 11-15% of the total insecticides in the market. Differentgenerations of neonicotinoids have been created over time. They have the sameprinciple of action in the nervous system; however, the specific active ingredients are different. The first generation of this pesticide class used was 1-(6-chloro-1,3-thiazol- 5-ylmethyl)-1,3,5-oxadiazinan-4-ylidenene(nitro)amine, known as Imidacloprid. It was first registered for use in the United States by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1994.

Isolation and identification of Soil Fungi from Wheat Cultivated Area of Uttar Pradesh

Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is one of the most important cereals in the world and is part of a staple diet for nearly 35% of the world’s population. It is grown in about 102 countries of the world covering about220.69 million hectares of land which is 32% of the total cultivated land of the world. The area and production increased to 0.83 million hectare and 1.84 million metric tons, respectively in 2000.

Soil fungi play an important role as major decomposers in the soil ecosystem. There are about 75,000 species of soil fungi in the world. Fungi are one of the dominant groups present in soil, which strongly influence ecosystem structure and functioning and thus plays a key role in many ecological services. Therefore, there is a growing interest in assessing soil biodiversity and its biological functioning.The yield was 2.8 t/ha in 2011-2012cropping year which is very low compared to those in the research farm level(3.5 t/ha to 5.1 t/ha). Coupled with many other factors, diseases also play an important role in lowering the yield .The process of decomposition is governed by the succession of fungi at various stage of decomposition nutrient level of soil, crop residue and prevailing environmental conditions.The current study was aimed detection of soil fungi from wheat field. The study involved isolation, identification and screening of soil fungi of fungal species prevailed Allahabad, Varanasi, and Mirzapur districts of Uttar Pradesh in India.

Dendrimers as an Efficient Catalyst for the Oxidation of Multi Substituted Alcohols

Ideally, dendrimers are perfect mono disperse macromolecules with a regular and highly branched three-dimensional architecture. Dendrimers are produced in an iterative sequence of reaction steps, in which each additional interaction leads to a higher generation material. The first example of an iterative synthetic procedure towardwell-defined branched structures has been reported by Vogtle, who named thisprocedure a “cascade synthesis”. A few years later, in the early 1980s, Denke walter 2-During the early years, the area blossomed and dendrimers based on a variety of repeat units appeared: these included amides, amines, carbo silanes, siloxanes, esters, ethers, phenyl acetylenes, various organometallics, amino acids and even nucleic acid based dendrimers. 

In addition, secondary function was also incorporated into these systems. These included porphyrins, phthalocyanines, saccharides, mesogens, anionic and cationic groups and various chromophores. Over the next few years more and more applied systems began to bedeveloped and this area of applied research is now one of the most vibrantareas of dendrimer chemistry. Examples of such applications are many and diverse: they include encapsulation and solubilisation, medicinal and bio mimetic applications, novel materials, and catalysis.