The safety of plant-derived bioactive compounds has become a global concern. The present study investigated the dose response of total saponins isolated from the stem bark of Dialiumguineense. Adultmale Wistar rats (n = 15) weighing 170 – 190 g (mean weight = 180 ± 10 g) were randomly assigned to three groups (5 rats per group). The rats received varied doses of total saponins isolated from the stem bark of the medicinal plant (50 - 150 mg/kg body weight, bwt) orally for a period of 9 days. The concentration of fasting blood glucose (FBG) was used as the therapeutic index.The results of the analysis revealed that total saponins isolated from the stem bark of D. guineense significantly reduced the Fasting Blood Glucose (FBG) levels of normal Wistar rats (p < 0.05). The graded and quantal dose-response curves showed that150 mg/kg bwt was effective in reducing the blood glucose of rats (produced the best hypoglycemic effect). The study concluded that total saponins isolated from the stem bark of D. guineense possesses hypoglycemic effect at a relatively good dose. Show less

Plant leaf diseases pose significant threats to crop yield and agricultural sustainability, making early and accurate detection crucial for effective disease management. In current years, deep neural network (DNN) techniques have shown remarkable potential in the field of image classification, including plant disease detection. The study aims to investigate the performance of two popular deep learning architectures, namely, VGG16 and InceptionResNetV2, for the detection of tomato plant leaf disease. The proposed methodology involves acquiring a diverse dataset comprising high-resolution images of healthy and diseased leaves from the target crops. Preprocessing techniques such as image augmentation and normalization are applied to enhance the generalization ability of the models and mitigate overfitting. Transfer learning is employed to initialize the deep learning architectures with weights pre-trained on large-scale image datasets to accelerate convergence and improve the models' performance in limited data scenarios. To evaluate performance of proposed networks various metrics such as validation and test accuracies, precision and recall, F1 score, and the area under the curve (AUC) are considered. From the investigations, the classification accuracy of the finest architectures is as follows: 99.8 percent for VGG16 and 99.4 percent for InceptionResNetV2 on Corn Leaves. The results suggest that the models developed during the investigation phase to identify the leaf disease were superior to any existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Show less

The emission of completely developed secondary fronds from pinnae tips is described for the first time in a fern belonging to the species Nephrolepis cordifolia. The phenotype described in the paper has so far been reported very rarely and only in other Nephrolepisspecies. The phenotype demonstrates that the development of a whole frond from the apex of a secondary leaf is possible and it can be related to an alteration in the meristematic activity of the pinna apex. The stability of the phenotype over time, the occurrence of all the developmental stages of the phenotype in the same frond and the recurring appearance of the phenomenon in plants propagated from the original individual make the germplasm described in this work a plant model suitable for investigating leaf morphological plasticity in plants. Show less

Background Sweet corn (Zea mays L. saccharata) is a high-demand, nutrient-sensitive cereal crops whose yield and crop quality depend heavily on early vegetative vigor and stress resilience. Spiritual Blessing (Biofield) Energy Treatment (SBET) has emerged as a non-invasive, biostimulatory approach to alter seed germinability, metabolic efficiency, and physiological development without ecological toxicity. Objective This study aimed to systematically evaluate the impact of SBET on key morphological attributes, vegetative growth, and reproductive productivity parameters of Zea mays L. saccharata. Methods Seeds and plots were assigned to two primary experimental groups: untreated/control sweet corn group (CONSCORG) and a biofield energy treated sweet corn group (BTSCORG) under identical field management practices. Key morphological metrics and post-harvest productivity were evaluated. Results Vegetative growth parameters showed substantial gains, including increased stem diameter, leaf width, flag leaf length, flag leaf width, anthesis silk interval, and tassel branching by 29.63% (p ≤ 0.001), 40.06% (p ≤ 0.001), 41.57% (p ≤ 0.001), 48.67% (p = 0.001), 73.21% (p ≤ 0.001) and 35.65% (p = 0.011), respectively, in the BTSCORG than CONSCORG. Moreover, comparative analysis revealed statistically significant improvements of ear/cob length, ear/cob diameter, number of kernels per row, and kernels per plant by 40.22% (p ≤ 0.001), 84% (p ≤ 0.001), 57.16% (p ≤ 0.001), and 37.81% (p ≤ 0.001), respectively, in the BTSCORG compared to the CONSCORG. Furthermore, the grain yield/hectare (ton/h) and straw/stover yield/hectare (ton/ha) were improved by 57.14% and 43.72%, respectively, in the BTSCORG compared to the CONSCORG. Conclusion SBET exerted a favorable influence on both vegetative growth parameters and reproductive yield factors in Zea mays L. saccharata. Show less