Ecofriendly anti-corrosives of steel developed

Industries incur significant economic losses due to metal corrosion. Using anti-corrosives can minimize these losses. Most of the available anti-corrosives are expensive and harmful for the environment. Now, scientists have found 3 new anti-corrosives of mild steel that are environmentally safe and cheaper.

Mild steel has high strength and costs less, which is why it makes for an excellent material in many industries such as cooling systems, refinery units, pipelines, chemicals, oil and gas production units, boilers, and water processors.

However, mild steel gets corroded in water with time. New anti-corrosives to prevent degradation of mild steel were found by scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University in India, Jan Dlugosz University in Poland, North-West University in South Africa, and Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, who published their results in the journal Scientific Reports.

“All studied molecules act as good inhibitors for mild steel corrosion”, say scientists C Verma, MA Quraishi, K Kluza, MM Janusik, L Olasunkanmi, and E Ebenso.

The anti-corrosives are named GPH 1-3. They are made from glucose that costs INR 460 per Kg. It is also environmentally safe and easily available. Other commercially used anti-corrosives are made from toxic and expensive chemicals such as glucosamine that costs INR 80,000 per kg.

Coating the surface of mild steel with anti-corrosives GPH1-3 could prevent up to 97% of the metal from being wasted. Even at temperatures as high as 65 degree Celsius, the anti-corrosive GPH3 could prevent 77% of the metal from being wasted.

“The global cost of corrosion is estimated as high as USD2.5Trillion. A significant cost of corrosion can be saved using corrosion inhibitor technology”, says Professor MA Quraishi, at the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, who is a part of the international team that found the new anti-corrosives. 

Reference: Scientific Reports 7: 44432.

Published- India Science Wire

Reducing pesticides to improve Indian crop productivity

A study from 946 arable farms in France shows that reduced use of pesticides can still improve crop productivity and assure profitability, provided the farming practices are modified. Adopting cropping systems with reduced pesticide use would not impact productivity in 94% of farms, and could even be associated with enhanced productivity in 39% of farms.

The climate in France is temperate as in northwestern India, and the study covers a large range of soils, including soils with low available water capacity. Reducing the use of pesticides by 40-60% in France improved the crop productivity in 39% of the farms, which have temperate climate, and soils with low available water capacity like those in northwestern India, making the study particularly relevant for India.

The productivity of crops like farms growing maize, straw cereals, oilseed rape, and sunflower with low amounts of pesticides was potentially improved when the pesticide burden was reduced as compared with farms more reliant on pesticides. “Pesticide use could be reduced without a significant impact on profitability in 67% of the surveyed farms. In 11% of the farms, pesticide use reduction could even significantly increase profitability”, say scientists at the Agrosolutions and National Institute for Agricultural Research, France in their recent study published in the journal Nature Plants.

This strategy failed in those 6% farms where the soils were loamy with high available water capacity, which is ideal for growing crops like potato and sugar beet. Indeed, those crops are both highly profitable for farmers, and strongly reliant on pesticides, so in France where these crops are grown, the most profitable farms are also those farms that use the highest levels of pesticides. For most 55% of the farms, reducing pesticides did not reduce crop productivity, did not affect it significantly, indicating that using pesticide in most of these farms was redundant.

Using pesticides in agriculture poses environmental and health hazards. Since a long time, researchers have argued whether agriculture with lesser pesticides can be as productive and profitable as current agricultural practices. “Low pesticide use is rarely associated with decreased productivity and profitability in arable farms, provided that several alternative non-chemical measures to control pests and weeds are also adopted”, claim scientists in their report.

The Ministry of Agriculture is a nodal ministry that deals with pesticides, encourages the proper use of pesticides and develops alternatives to pesticides to promote sustainable agriculture in India. A drastic reduction in pesticides use may seem to deeply impact the market organization and trade balance in the agricultural sector. This recent study in France invigorates the need to carry out a rigorous analysis of the proposal to reduce pesticides for agriculture in the Indian setting, which might be a key to pesticide-free future.

Reference: Nature Plants 3: 17008.

Scientists find new way to treat ovarian cancer

A group of Indian scientists have discovered a new way to treat ovarian cancer.

It has been found that ovarian cancer cells that are resistant to the anticancer drug, cisplatin, have high levels of a protein called KDM3A. If a new drug can be found to deplete this protein, it will boost the fight against ovarian cancer. Such drugs or inhibitors are already known, but they have to tested against ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer is the third leading site for cancer in women in India, after cervix and breast.  More than 60% of the women, who have ovarian cancer, do not survive beyond five years.  After it is diagnosed, ovarian tumor is removed by surgery and the patient is treated with chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin. In most cases, the tumor becomes resistant to chemotherapy and starts growing again. This is because the tumor has cancer stem cells. These cells are a subset of tumor cells that overcome chemotherapy and do not die in the presence of anticancer drugs.

Researchers at the Dr. ALM PG Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Madras studied ovarian cancer stem cells.  They found that cells that are resistant to chemotherapy have high levels of the protein KDM3A, which controls the expression of DNA at specific locations.

Ovarian cancer samples from human patients had this protein in abundance. When scientists depleted it, cancer cells died. Moreover, it also killed cancer stem cells that could not be killed by the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. In a mouse with ovarian tumor, removing KDM3A reduced the size of the tumor significantly.

The study was done in collaboration with David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles in USA. Scientists published their results in the international journal Oncogene. Scientists say, “KDM3A protein can be a potential drug target that can be exploited to device a novel therapy against drug-resistant ovarian cancer.” The research team included S Ramadoss, S Sen, I Ramachandran, S Roy, G Chaudhuri, and R Farias-Eisne. 

Published- India Science Wire

Reference: Oncogene 36: 1537–1545. 

Towards making a better Dengue vaccine

Scientists have identified a protein that could make for a better dengue vaccine in the future. It is a small protein, which is identical in all the four virus types of dengue. Making an effective vaccine against dengue has remained a challenge for more than seven decades now.

Research on dengue began in the year 1929. It took a long time for scientists to understand how the disease spreads and damages the body. Studies on dengue revealed that the virus that causes Dengue has four types, named DENV-1 to 4. These four types of virus trigger different immune responses in the human body.  Hence, it was a challenge to make a uniform vaccine to target all the four viral types.

A commercial dengue vaccine was available in the year 2016 but it is yet to be licensed in India. To help make a vaccine that prevents dengue infection from all the four types of virus, scientists at the Alaggapa University in Tamil Nadu, used a computer program to identify a protein that could make for an effective vaccine, and which is common to all the four viral types.

They identified a protein, which is made of fifteen amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. This protein is a component of the outer envelope of the dengue virus and shares 100% similarity in all four viral types. The scientists also found that this sequence shares some similarity with fifteen other dengue proteins, which have been proved to trigger immune response in previous studies. They published their results in the Indian Journal of Medical Research.

Using small proteins of the virus to make the vaccine instead of using the complete virus is a safer method of immunization. Predicting these small proteins that can make for good vaccines by computer programs saves time and cost. “In the future, this approach can be used for the analysis of other pathogens, providing a novel and generalized approach to the formulation of vaccines that are effective against a broad diversity of pathogens”, say scientists K Muthusamy, K Gopinath and D Nandhini. 

Published- India Science Wire

Reference: Indian J Med Res 144: 587-591.

Professor CNR Rao suggests campaign to promote science as a career

Motivating children to pursue and excel in science will add intellectual workforce to mitigate the challenges of the future, and bring recognition and respect for the country, according to eminent scientist Prof C N R Rao.

Science is the answer to all challenges that we face today such as exploding population, pollution, global warming, and the need for alternative sources of energy, to name a few. Science is a powerful tool to improve the society and our lives. But, how do we motivate young children to pursue science? Professor Rao observed while addressing children from all over the country linked via Edusat, at Vigyan Prasar here.

Our rural population comprises of 50million children, and statistically speaking, there is a high probability that there is a Faraday, Maxwell, or Einstein there, said Professor Rao. He motivated children from different schools to excel in science. He also urged the need to motivate children in rural India.

Science too, like other professions today, is highly competitive and interdisciplinary. Professor Rao suggests that we should inculcate the following values in kids to motivate them to pursue science.

·       Passion to find unknown and new things. This requires us to encourage children to ask questions. Teachers have the responsibility of teaching what isn’t in the textbooks.

·       Children must be taught to pay attention to the problems around them. Then work on ideas and solutions. Students in Delhi for example, must ask how to mitigate the Delhi smog, make cars that run on clean energy, or find materials that suck up carbon dioxide from vehicle emissions.

·       Children must have a science role model very early in life. It boosts their interest and confidence to pursue science.

·       We must tell our children to maintain high ethical standards. Fools can also make money, a lot of it rather, but only smart people can do science, he said. Smart people are not only intelligent; they also abide by ethics.

·       We must teach children to be generous. You cannot do science if you are selfish, he said. Science requires sharing of ideas and resources, collaboration with peers, honest mentoring, and justified use of public money. All of this is possible if Indians practice generosity from an early age.

·       Our children must value hard work. Average Indians are lazy, including many professors and teachers. They need long coffee breaks, and need them frequently, he said. India will become great, only when all its citizens become hardworking.

Young kids are often fed with dreams of owning a mansion or a Ferrari, a billion dollar company, and having lots and lots of money. People often think that scientists taste success much later in life, as a result of which, they have a low bank balance. Succeeding in science, however, requires a different mindset. Scientists worry about creating knowledge, not about creating wealth. 

Published- India Science Wire