Impact evaluation based on benefit indicators (IEBBI): methodological proposal for agroecological farmers’ markets

Farmers’ markets represent a growing strategy for the generation of food sovereignty and sustainability; however, little is known about their impacts in economic, social and environmental terms. The objective of this research was to develop a framework that would allow determining that impact. The resulting methodological framework includes 20 indicators divided into seven groups: proximity, profitability, perceived benefits, areas of opportunity, economic impact, social impact, and environmental impact. This methodology was applied in one agroecological farmers’ market in Mexico City. Among the results, the main benefits are linked to socioeconomic interaction, while environmental impact indicators are the least considered. This methodology can guide the design, implementation, comparison, and monitoring of this type of initiative in the medium and long term. El marco metodológico resultante está compuesto por 20 indicadores distribuidos en siete grupos: indicadores de proximidad, rentabilidad, beneficios percibidos, áreas de oportunidad, impacto económico, impacto social e impacto ambiental. Esta metodología puede constituir una guía para orientar la política pública en el diseño, puesta en marcha, comparación y monitoreo de este tipo de iniciativas a mediano y largo plazo.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Bioplastics Production from Starch and Lignocellulosic Components

The accumulation of plastic wastes in different environments has become a topic of major concern over the past decades; therefore, technologies and strategies aimed at mitigating the environmental impacts of petroleum products have gained worldwide relevance. In this scenario, the production of bioplastics mainly from polysaccharides such as starch is a growing strategy and a field of intense research. The use of plasticizers, the preparation of blends, and the reinforcement of bioplastics with lignocellulosic components have shown promising and environmentally safe alternatives for overcoming the limitations of bioplastics, mainly due to the availability, biodegradability, and biocompatibility of such resources. This review addresses the production of bioplastics composed of polysaccharides from plant biomass and its advantages and disadvantages.

Ergonomic Stressors Among Pregnant Healthcare Workers

Workplace environment can have a considerable impact on the physical, psychological and maternal health of pregnant healthcare workers. This article aimed to summarise the impact of work-related ergonomic stressors on pregnancy outcomes for healthcare workers, along with potential interventions to resolve these stressors. A narrative review analysis using the Pearl Growing Strategy was conducted between February 2019 and June 2020 to identify English-language articles published between 2000 and 2020. A total of 89 studies were identified from the SCOPUS (Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands), MEDLINE® (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA) databases and Google Scholar (Google LLC, Menlo Park, California, USA). The results indicated that poor work-related ergonomics had detrimental effects on pregnancy outcomes, resulting in spontaneous abortions, preterm delivery, low birth weight babies and infertility. Policymakers and employers should conduct ergonomic assessments and implement appropriate practices to ensure the safety of pregnant healthcare workers. Keywords: Healthcare Workers; Physical Ergonomics; Pregnancy Outcomes; Occupational Health; Occupational Exposure.

KinaFrag explores the kinase-ligand fragment interaction space for selective kinase inhibitor discovery

Protein kinases play a crucial role in many cellular signaling processes, making them one of the most important families of drug targets. But selectivity put a barrier at the design of kinase inhibitors. Fragment-based drug design strategies have been successfully applied to develop novel selective kinase inhibitors. However, the complicate kinase-fragment interaction and fragment-to-lead process pose challenges to fragment-based kinase discovery. Here, we developed a web source KinaFrag to investigate kinase-fragment interaction space and perform fragment-to-lead optimization. KinaFrag contained 31464 fragments from reported kinase inhibitors, which involved 3244 crystal fragment structures and 7783 crystal kinase-fragment complexes. These crystal fragments were classified by their binding cleft and subpockets, and their 3D structure and interactions were displayed in KinaFrag. In addition, the structural information, physicochemical information, similarity information, and substructure relationship information were contained in KinaFrag. Moreover, a computational fragment growing strategy obviously developed by our group was implemented in the KinaFrag. We test this fragment growing strategy using our fragment libraries, and obtained a lead compound of c-Met with ~1000-fold in vitro activity improvement compared with the hit compound. We hope KinaFrag could become a powerful tool for the fragment-based kinase inhibitor design. KinaFrag is freely available at http://chemyang.ccnu.edu.cn/ccb/database/KinaFrag/.

Strategy for Sustainable Village Status Improvement in Kundur Village Kepulauan Meranti District

This research discusses about strategies to sustainable improve village status in the village of Kundur, Kepulauan Meranti Regency. The problems and phenomena in this study are the selection of Kundur village to be one of the priority development target villages, the lower the IKE value in 2018-2019, and the IDM calculation 2018-2019 The purpose of this research (1) to find out the social, economic and ecology conditions in the Kundur village, (2) to find out the strategies carried out to continuously improve the status of the Kundur village. The research method used is a mixed method. From the results of the study, the existing conditions of social security get a sccore of 0,878 economic resilience of 0,600 ecology resilience of 0,850. From the results of these scores get the Kundur village IDM score of 0,776. And the strategy that should be carried out by the Kundur village to improve the status of thee village is anaggresive and growing strategy, by making utilizing human resources in maintaining natural resources for sustainable development, innovation in adding village owned business entity (BUMDes) units in accordance with existing conditions, and addition of plantation production types.

Fully-automatic segmentation of coronary artery using growing algorithm

Currently, cardiac computed tomography angiography (CTA) is widely applied to coronary artery disease diagnosis. Automatic segmentation of coronary artery has played an important role in coronary artery disease diagnosis. In this study, we propose and test a fully automatic coronary artery segmentation method that does not require any human-computer interaction. The proposed method uses a growing strategy and contains three main parts namely, (1) the initial seed detection that automatically detects the root points of the left and right coronary arteries where the ascending aorta meets the coronary arteries, (2) the growing strategy that searches for the neighborhood blocks to decide the existence of coronary arteries with an improved convolutional neural network, and (3) the iterative termination condition that decides whether the growing iteration finishes. The proposed framework is validated using a dataset containing 32 cardiac CTA volumes from different patients for training and testing. Experimental results show that the proposed method obtained a Dice loss ranged from 0.70 to 0.83, which indicates that the new method outperforms the traditional methods such as level set.

MHD Free Convection of Localized Heat Source/Sink in Hybrid Nanofluid-Filled Square Cavity

In the field of heat transfer enhancement, there is a very new growing strategy to use hybrid nanofluid consisting of two or more nanoparticles dispersed in a base fluid. The current perusal introduces a numerical analysis to investigate the importance of hybrid nanofluid in the free convection inside a partially heated square cavity, and subjected to inclined magnetic field with heat generation/absorption. The horizontal walls are kept adiabatic. Numerical solution of mathematical model which describes the problem is achieved by finite difference method. The Conventional models of Brinkman and Maxwell were applied to assess the viscosity and thermal conductivity of the Cu-Al2O3-Water hybrid nanofluid. The considered problem was studied by varying some parameters such as the size and position of the heat source/sink, heat generation parameter, Hartmann number, and three combinations of nanoparticles volume fractions. The results show that the Nusselt number of hybrid nanofluid is higher than the Alumina-water nanofluid and less than the Copper-water nanofluid.

Fragment-Based Design of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis InhA Inhibitors

<p>Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of mortality amongst infectious diseases worldwide. InhA, an enoyl ACP-reductase, has been the focus of numerous drug discovery efforts as this is the target of the first line pro-drug isoniazid. However, with resistance to this drug becoming more common the aim has been to find new clinical candidates that directly inhibit this enzyme and that do not require activation by the catalase peroxidase KatG, thus circumventing the majority of the resistance mechanisms. In this work, the screening and validation of a fragment library is described and development of the fragment hits using a fragment growing strategy was employed which led to the development InhA inhibitors with affinities of up to 250 nM.</p>

Fragment-Based Design of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis InhA Inhibitors

<p>Tuberculosis (TB) remains a leading cause of mortality amongst infectious diseases worldwide. InhA, an enoyl ACP-reductase, has been the focus of numerous drug discovery efforts as this is the target of the first line pro-drug isoniazid. However, with resistance to this drug becoming more common the aim has been to find new clinical candidates that directly inhibit this enzyme and that do not require activation by the catalase peroxidase KatG, thus circumventing the majority of the resistance mechanisms. In this work, the screening and validation of a fragment library is described and development of the fragment hits using a fragment growing strategy was employed which led to the development InhA inhibitors with affinities of up to 250 nM.</p>