Global Information Resources on Rice for Research and Development

Various issues concerning the progress of rice research are related to ambiguous germplasm identification, difficulty in tracing pedigree information, and lack of integration between genetic resources, characterization, breeding, evaluation and utilization data. These issues are the constraints in developing knowledge-intensive crop improvement programs. The rapid growth, development and the global spread of modern information and communication technology allow quick adoption in fundamental research. Thus, there is a need to provide an opportunity for the establishment of services which describe the rice information for better accessibility to information resources used by researchers to enhance the competitiveness. This work reviews some of available resources on rice bioinformatics and their roles in elucidating and propagating biological and genomic information in rice research. These reviews will also enable stakeholders to understand and adopt the change in research and development and share knowledge with the global community of agricultural scientists. The establishment like International Rice Information System, Rice Genome Research Project and Integrated Rice Genome Explorer are major initiatives for the improvement of rice. Creation of databases for comparative studies of rice and other cereals are major steps in further improvement of genetic compositions. This paper will also highlight some of the initiatives and organizations working in the field of rice improvement and explore the availability of the various web resources for the purpose of research and development of rice. We are developing a meta web server for integration of online resources such as databases, web servers and journals in the area of bioinformatics. This integrated platform, with acronym iBIRA, is available online at http：//ibiranet.in. The resources reviewed here are the excerpts from the resources integrated in iBIRA.

Totally Anisotropic Cosmological Models with Bulk Viscosity for Variable G and Λ

Einstein's field equations with variable gravitational and cosmological constants are considered in the presence of bulk viscous fluid for the totally anisotropic Bianchi type II space-time in such a way as to preserve the energy momentum tensor. We have presented solutions of field equations which represent expanding, shearing and non-rotating cosmological models of the universe. The physical behaviours of the models are discussed .We observe that the results obtained match with recent observations of SNIa.

Bianchi-Type VI_(0) Bulk Viscous Fluid Models with Variable Gravitational and Cosmological Constants

This paper deals with Bianchi type VI0 anisotropic cosmological models filled with a bulk viscous cosmic fluid in the presence of time-varying gravitational and cosmological constant. Physically realistic solutions of Einstein's field equations are obtained by assuming the conditions 1) the expansion scalar is proportional to shear scalar 2) the coefficient of the bulk viscosity is a power function of the energy density and 3) the cosmic fluid obeys the barotropic equation of state. We observe that the corresponding models retain the well established features of the standard cosmology and in addition, are in accordance with recent type Ia supernovae observations. Physical behaviours of the cosmological models are also discussed.