Comparative Analysis of EST Mining Reveals High Degree of Conservation among Eight Leguminosae Species

Fabaceae is the third largest family of flowering plants and is unique among crops in their ability of fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Fabaceae is one of the few plant families with extensive genomic data available in multiple species. The unprecedented complexity and impending completeness of these data create opportunities for discovering new approaches. The Legume and Medicago share much-conserved colinearity between their genomes which can be exploited for the genomic research in Leguminosae crops. In this study, 1,952,191 ESTs of 8 Leguminosae species were clustered into unigenes contigs and compared with Medicago truncatula gene indices. Almost all the unigenes of Leguminosae species showed high similarity with Medicago genes, except for those of Lens culinaris, where 95% of unigenes were found similar. A total of 10,874 SSRs were identified in the unigenes. Functional annotation of unigenes showed that the majority of the genes are present in metabolism and energy functional classes. It is expected that comparative genomic analysis between Medicago and related crop species will expedite research in other Legume species. This would be helpful for genomics as well as evolutionary studies, and the DNA markers developed can be used for mapping, tagging and cloning of specific important genes in Leguminosae.

Tin Sulfide Nanoparticle Synthesis from Waste Waters

Tin and its derivatives are extensively used in modern technology tools which lead requirement for development of green methods for its waste management and profitable recycling. Presence of tin in water bodies causes enormous environmental concern due to its acute toxicity to living beings. We demonstrate a simple and zero emission process for extraction of tin ions from aqueous solution using dithiocarbamate-based copolymer and its single step quantitative recovery and transformation into SnS nanoparticles. The polymer shows high metal extraction capacity, 1.06 g SnCl2 per gram of polymer. The polymer metal composite and SnS nanoparticles are analyzed using TEM, FTIR, XRD spectroscopy techniques. The FTIR shows formation of Sn-S bonding in the polymer metal composite. This study has implication for cost effective and green approach for purification of water and waste management.

Green Approach for <i>In-Situ</i>Growth of CdS Nanorods in Low Band Gap Polymer Network for Hybrid Solar Cell Applications

In-situ growth of CdS nanorods (NRs) has been demonstrated via solvothermal, in a low band gap polymer, poly [[4,8-bis[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy] benzo [1,2-b:4,5-b’] dithiophene-2,6-diyl] [3-fluoro-2-[(2-ethylhexyl) carbonyl] thieno [3,4-b] thiophenediyl]] (PTB7). It is a high yielding, green approach as it removes use of volatile and hazardous chemicals such as pyridine as ligand which are conventionally used to synthesize precursors of CdS (NRs). Moreover the solvothermal process is a zero emission process being a close vessel synthesis and hence no material leaching into the atmosphere during the synthesis. The PTB7:CdS nanocomposite has been characterized by SEM, XRD, FTIR, UV-visible spectroscopy techniques. The photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy study of PTB7 with CdS NRs has shown significant PL quenching by the incorporation of CdS NRs in PTB7;this shows that CdS NRs are efficient electron acceptors with the PTB7. The PTB7:CdS is used as active layer in the fabrication of hybrid solar cells (HSC) as donor-acceptor combination in the bulk heterojunction (BHJ) geometry. The HSCs fabricated using this active layer without any additional supporting fullerene based electron acceptor has given power conversion efficiency of above 1%.