Bacillus thuringiensis subsp. israelensis is the most important biological insecticide for the control of mosquito vectors of disease. This bacterium produces toxins during sporulation that cause larval death by lysis of cells in their midgut. The pBtoxis plasmid of B. thuringiensis subsp. israelensis encodes all the mosquitocidal toxins and a number of other coding sequences. The plasmid also carries potential germination genes organised in a single ger operon. Comparison of the germination responses of spores from strains with and without pBtoxis revealed that this plasmid could promote activation of the spores under alkaline conditions but not following heat treatment. Introduction of the ger operon on a recombinant plasmid to the plasmidless strain established this operon as the first with an identified role in alkaline activation.

Abstract: Monitoring the concentrations of heavy metals in natural and waste water at and below the level of their maximum permissible concentrations is an urgent environmental problem. Hence, new procedures for the preconcentration of heavy metals with their subsequent determination by different methods are required. Along with other sorbents, significant attention is attracted to polymer chelating sorbents, which provide individual or group extraction of trace elements, eliminate matrix effects, and provide high concentration factors. The effect of the various parameters such as electrochemically and chemically synthesis methods, physical oxidation state of the polymer, polymer thickness, solution pH and metal ion concentration on the adsorption, kinetics and efficiency were investigated. The results showed a vary broad concentration range of the heavy metals from (0.05 to 10 mg/L) can be adsorbed on different kinds of polymers at different pH values and different efficiently. The adsorption capacity of the polymer to different concentrations of heavy metals was evaluated as the milligram of metal ions by one gram of various forms of the polymer. The DC conductivity measurements were also employed on the solid polymer before and after adsorption of metal ions. The experimental adsorption date was fitted to different mathematical isotherms to estimate the binding constant of heavy metals with the polymer in both single and mixed ion solutions. The method provides the extraction of analytes from natural water of complex composition containing high concentrations of alkali, alkaline-earth and other elements and is characterized by rapidly, selectivity, low detection limits, and a high reproducibility of the results. The relative standard deviation is 2-4%. The technique was test with real waste water samples.  

Research was conducted at Curtin University (Western Australia) to assess the seedling tolerance of three species Eucalyptus, gomphocephala DC (Myrtaceae) (common name ‘Tuart’), Eucalyptus marginata Sm. (common name ‘Jarrah’) and Corymbia calophylla (Lindl.) K.D. Hill & J. A. S. Johnson (common name ‘Marri’) to soil-induced stressor, namely water loggings (flooding). Flooding treatment was achieved by filling the tubs with water, approximately 1 cm above the soil surface and control treatment had the same method except with drainage holes. Study assessment was attained by statistical change in seedling growth, leaf allocation and leaf physiology after 70 days of seed germination. Tolerance was assessed by measuring changes in seedling growth, leaf allocation and leaf physiology after 70-80 days. C. calophylla was the most tolerant to prolonged waterlogging (80% survival, no difference in transpiration rates); E. marginata was the least tolerant (10% survival, 95% decrease in transpiration rate). E. marginata was the least tolerant to the three soil stresses. E. marginata prefers habitats that are not excessively wet on well-drained soils. C. calophylla was the most tolerant, occurring and tolerating wet, well-drained soils and thus demonstrated better physiological responses of three prominent studied eucalypts to soil-induced stresses provides us with invaluable knowledge for rehabilitating and restoring urban bush land.tolerance to prolong waterlogging. Knowing the seedling growth and

Abstract— In this paper, the XMLSchema-driven mapping of architecture components for generating new data formats will be introduced and an investigation of how the XMLSchema can be stored in different ways will be carried out. In general, any application that has the capability to work with XML documents will need to display the structure of its related data in a different format specified for a particular occasion, due to its nature in working in heterogeneous environment. Accordingly, mapping document from one data structure to another is needed. Such a mapping process is essential, especially when dealing with XMLSchema. Actually, when the data are to be translated between XML and database there should be some means of mapping formulated for the data before they can be transferred either to the database or in the document. Most of the techniques use object relational mapping for transforming data between XML and the database. In this paper, we will present different types of mapping of XMLSchema such as tree-to-tree which means XMLSchema to another XMLSchema and XMLSchema to XHTML. Other mappings are XMLSchema to relation, XMLSchema to object relational, and XMLSchema to relational algebra. We also introduce general algorithms for many of the mapping types. The algorithms and the techniques show how XMLSchema drives the mapping of architecture components to generate a new data structure.

Abstract— Query expansion is the process of supplementing additional terms to the original query to improve the information retrieval (IR) performance. For heavily inflectional languages such as Arabic, query expansion is considered a difficult task. In this paper, the well-known approach: "The similarity thesaurus" is adopted to be applied on Arabic. Prior to applying this approach, first; datasets (three collections of Arabic documents) are pre-processed to create documents inverted index vocabularies, then, the normal indexing process is carried out. The thesaurus method is applied to create a modified (expanded) query of the original one and the target collection is indexed once more. To gauge the enhancement of retrieval process, the results of normal indexing and those of applying thesaurus approach are evaluated against each other using precision and recall measures. The results have shown that the thesaurus method has considerably enhanced the performance of the Arabic Information Retrieval (AIR) System. As the number of expansion terms increases up to a certain extent (35 terms), the performance has been improved. On the other hand, the performance will not be affected, or grow insignificantly as the number of expansion terms exceeds this limit.

The present paper involves a detailed comparison between the salt tolerance and physiological responseof three eucalypt species occurring within the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Eucalyptus gomphocephala DC (Myrtaceae) (common name ‘Tuart’) is restricted to the calcareous (limestone), brown or yellow sand of the coastal Spearwood dunes. Eucalyptus marginata Sm. (common name ‘Jarrah’) is a small tree on the porous, well-drained sandy soils of the Bassendean dunes Plain, and a much larger tree on the Darling Range. Corymbia calophylla (Lindl.) K.D. Hill & J. A. S. Johnson (common name ‘Marri’), and has a similar distribution to that of Jarrah, but is more common on wetter, well drained soils. This investigate implemented to find out the seedling tolerance of these three species to soil-induced stressor, namely salinity via addition of sodium chloride solution. Tolerance assessment measured changes in seedling growth, leaf allocation and leaf physiology after 70-80 days. Neither E. marginata and C. calophylla could tolerate the highest salinity (0.25 M NaCl solutions) with 9-13% survival, although E. marginata was clearly the least tolerant with 52% reduction in relative growth rate and a 88% in transpiration rates. E. gomphocephala was the most tolerant to salt stress in terms of survival and growth parameters. 

The title complex was isolated as a red solid from the reaction of 4-(salicylaldiminato)antipyrine, HL, and cobalt (II) acetate in ethanol. The complex has been characterized by elemental analysis, FTIR, UV-Vis, and X-ray single crystal diffraction. Two crystallographically different cationic units, A and B, of the title complex are found. Both units are essentially isostructural; nevertheless, small differences exist between them. Both units contain four cobalt atoms arranged at the corners of distorted cubane like core alternatively with phenoxy oxygen of the Schiff base. In both cases, one cobalt binds to three coordinated sites from the corresponding tridentate Schiff base ligand, and the fourth one was bonded by the acetate oxygen, and the fifth and the sixth donor sites come from the phenolate oxygen of another Schiff base ligand.

Abstract With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) have recently become a focus of research. Query expansion is defined as the process of supplementing additional terms or phrases to the original query to improve the information retrieval performance. Arabic is highly inflectional and derivational language which makes the query expansion process a hard task. In this paper, the well known approach, Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) is adopted to be applied on Arabic. Prior to applying PRF, first; datasets (three collections of Arabic documents) are pre-processed to create documents inverted index vocabularies, then, the normal indexing process is carried out. The PRF is applied to create a modified (expanded) query of the original one and the target collection is indexed once more. To judge the enhancement of retrieval process, the results of normal indexing and those of applying PRF are evaluated against each other using precision and recall measures. The results have shown that the PRF method has significantly enhanced the performance of the Arabic Information Retrieval (AIR) System. As the number of expansion terms increases up to a certain extent (35 terms), the performance has been improved. On the other hand, the performance will not be affected, or grow insignificantly as the number of expansion terms exceeds this limit.