Phytoplankton diversity in wastewater impacted Indian Ramsar site: a study from East Kolkata Wetland.

A seasonal study was undertaken to understand the influence of wastewater on phytoplankton distribution in a water body of East Kolkata Wetland (EKW), a designated Ramsar site in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. A total of 19 different genera of phytoplankton belonging to 5 phyla were recorded. Among all the groups, Chlorophyceae was found to be dominated by 8 genera followed by Bacillariophycaeae (4 genera), Cyanophyceae (4 genera), Euglenophyceae (2 genera), and Zygnematophyceae (1 genus). Seasonal variability showed maximum dominance of phytoplankton during post-monsoon and least during pre-monsoon months. Shannon-Wiener diversity (H') indices indicated Bacillariophyceae to be most species rich (1.059) while the most dominant group (D) was observed to be Chlorophyceae (0.507). Assessment of Palmer algal pollution index (PI) revealed the water body is impacted by high organic pollution during monsoon (22) compared to the pre-monsoon (19) and post-monsoon seasons (15). The results of canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) indicated water temperature, alkalinity, total dissolved solids, dissolved oxygen, and electrical conductivity as the major influencing parameters for growth and distribution of the phytoplankton in the water body. Therefore, it can be stated that hydrological alteration of a water body fed with wastewater plays a significant role in regulating the plankton density, richness, and diversity.

GC-EnC: A Copula based ensemble of CNNs for malignancy identification in breast histopathology and cytology images.

In the present work, we have explored the potential of Copula-based ensemble of CNNs(Convolutional Neural Networks) over individual classifiers for malignancy identification in histopathology and cytology images. The Copula-based model that integrates three best performing CNN architectures, namely, DenseNet-161/201, ResNet-101/34, InceptionNet-V3 is proposed. Also, the limitation of small dataset is circumvented using a Fuzzy template based data augmentation technique that intelligently selects multiple region of interests (ROIs) from an image. The proposed framework of data augmentation amalgamated with the ensemble technique showed a gratifying performance in malignancy prediction surpassing the individual CNN's performance on breast cytology and histopathology datasets. The proposed method has achieved accuracies of 84.37%, 97.32%, 91.67% on the JUCYT, BreakHis and BI datasets respectively. This automated technique will serve as a useful guide to the pathologist in delivering the appropriate diagnostic decision in reduced time and effort. The relevant codes of the proposed ensemble model are publicly available on GitHub.

Ki67, p27 and p53 Expression in Squamous Epithelial Lesions of Larynx.

Precise assessment of the biological behavior and progression of squamous epithelial lesions of the larynx with a view to predict the prognosis and therapeutic challenges remains an elusive goal. The knowledge and data regarding the expression of proliferative markers indicating the biological activity in different histological grades of squamous epithelial lesions are lacking till date. To evaluate the relationship between Ki67, p27 and p53 expression as well as topographic distribution of Ki67 with the histological subtypes or grades of laryngeal squamous intraepithelial and invasive lesions. Sixty-two consecutive cases with histologically documented intraepithelial and invasive squamous lesion were studied for Ki67, p27 and p53 expression. Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis and Spearman's correlation tests were used for statistical analysis. The mean Ki67 labeling index in hyperplasia, dysplasia and carcinoma were 12.15, 22.03 and 35.53 % respectively and this difference was statistically significant (P < 0.05). There was strong positive correlation between Ki67 labeling index and increasing grades of squamous lesions. p27 expression was progressively decreased and p53 expression was progressively increased as the lesions progressed from hyperplasia to dysplasia and dysplasia to carcinoma. The topographic distribution of Ki67 positive cells increased with progressive grades of dysplasia. The Ki67 labeling index correlates well with the histological grade of both intraepithelial and invasive lesions of the larynx. And the topographic distribution of Ki67 expression depends on the grade of the dysplasia. Hence, Ki67 expression has a definite role in predicting the biological behavior of the lesions.

Toxicity of neem pesticides on a fresh water loach, Lepidocephalichthys guntea (Hamilton Buchanan) of Darjeeling district in West Bengal.

Static renewal bioassay tests were conducted to evaluate the acute toxicity of two neem based biopesticides, applied widely on tea plantation namely, Nimbecidine and Neem Gold either separately as well as, in combination to the fingerlings (mean body length- 4.46 +/- 0.15 cm; mean body weight- 0.49 +/- 0.15g) of a fresh water loach, Lepidocephalichthys guntea (Hamilton Buchanan) acclimatized to laboratory conditions prior to experiment. The 96 hours LC50 values for Nimbecidine and Neem Gold and the combination of the two were 0.0135 mgl(-1), 0.0525mgl(-1) and 0.0396 mgl(-1), respectively. The regular water quality analysis showed, that with increasing doses of biopesticides, dissolved oxygen level was lower and other parameters like pH, free carbon dioxide, total alkalinity total hardness, chloride ions of water increased. The fish under toxicity stress suffered several abnormalities such as erratic and rapid movement, body imbalance and surface floating responding proportionately to the increase in concentrations of the toxicant biopesticides. The 96 hours LC50 values proved Nimbecidine more toxic than Neem Gold and the combination of the two biopesticides.