Nutritional composition of Pakistani wheat varieties

Pakistani wheat varieties are grown over a wide agro-climatic range and as such are anticipated to exhibit yield and quality differences. It is therefore necessary to investigate the nutritional status of wheat varieties in terms of biochemical and physiochemical characteristics available for food and nutritional purposes in Pakistan. The result shows that wheat grains of different varieties contain a net protein level of 9.15%～10.27%, 2.15%～2.55% total fats, 1.72%～1.85% dietary fibers,77.65×10^-6～84.25×10^-6 of potassium and 7.70× 10 6～35.90× 10^-6 of sodium ions concentration, 0.24× 10^-6～0.84× 10^-6 of phosphorus, 1.44%～2.10% ash, 31.108～43.602 g of thousand grain mass （TGM） and 8.38%～9.67% moisture contents. This study is significant in providing an opportunity to explore the available wheat varieties and to further improve their nutritional excellence and also essential for setting nutritional regulations for domestic and export purposes.     

Effectiveness of ontology-based learning content generation for preschool cognitive skills learning

During early childhood, children start developing their cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioural skills, laying the foundation for life-long learning. Cognitive skills are usually taught in traditional classrooms through the use of textbooks and worksheets. The learning content in these textbooks and worksheets is static pre-authored content that is repeatedly used for teaching and learning. This repetition jeopardises the child's learning of individualised and cognitive skills. Preschool cognitive skills learning content comprises facts of everyday life. Similarly, the Semantic Web attempts to model these facts through ontologies. From this, a relationship appears between preschool cognitive skills learning content and the ontologies. The present work focuses on the stated problem and presents the theoretical and development details of a child-friendly tutoring application that dynamically generates cognitive skills learning content using ontologies as domain knowledge. The proposed application was evaluated in a preschool environment for its learning effectiveness and the correctness of the generated content. Three groups of preschool children participated in the study for preschool cognitive skills learning through the use of the proposed application. The first group learned the cognitive skills through the traditional method with textbooks and the teacher's teaching. The second group learned the skills through the proposed application at school in classroom sessions. The third group experienced the proposed application both at school and at home, along with regular classroom sessions. The results show significant gains by the third group over the other two groups, and hence support the use of the proposed application in practice. However, the enhanced learning by the third group disappears if the additional application usage time is removed. Moreover, the results of the expert evaluation show that a great deal of the learning content was correctly generated, thus justifying the true modelling of the domain ontology.     

Bread wheat varieties as influenced by different nitrogen levels

INTRODUCTION Dera Ismail Khan lies in Pakistan’s arid zone (71.07° longitude, 31.57° latitude and 500 m above sea level). This zone is in the extreme south of (NWFP) Pakistan at the bank of the River Indus. Dera Ismail Khan is bounded by Sulaiman Range to the West, the Indus River on the East, Marwat and Bhit- tani Ranges on the North and Vehowa Nala (Punjab) on the South. Besides certain local variability the area is comprised of four basic divisions viz mountains, a series …     

Evaluating the quality of BEd programme: Students' views of their college experiences

Quality assurance of teacher training has become of a great concern nowadays. This paper addresses the quality of BEd programme of the University of Education (UE) Lahore. The main purpose of the study was to evaluate the quality of BEd programme with regard to the internal efficiency of Government Colleges for Elementary Teachers (GCETs), the affiliated institutions of UE. The study was conducted on a random sample of 600 BEd students drawn from 11 GCETs in Punjab province. Data was collected through a questionnaire which was validated through a pilot study in 2006. The reliability of the final questionnaire was established at 0.863 allowing the researcher to launch the study at large scale (Gay, 2000). The findings revealed that BEd programme was effective in terms of updating student teachers' knowledge and skills. Student teachers favoured the quality of BEd curriculum, lesson planning and presentation by themselves and their teacher educators, and had some reservations about the proper use of audio-visual aids for effective classroom teaching learning processes. Female gender showed more satisfaction with the quality of BEd curriculum and teaching than their male counterparts. No significant difference was found in the opinion of the students of GCETs having low, medium, and high enrolment.     

Immunocytochemical localization of carbonic anhydrase in the pseudobranch tissue of the rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss简

Pseudobranch function has long interested scientists, but its role has yet to be elucidated. Several studies have suggested that pseudobranchs serve respiratory, osmoregulatory, and sensory functions. This work investigated the immunolocalization of pseudobranch carbonic anhydrase (CA) in the teleost fish species rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) to clarify its physiological function. CA was purified from rainbow trout gills O. mykiss and specific antibodies were raised. Immunoblotting between tissue homogenates of pseudobranch and gill CA antibodies showed specific immunostaining with only one band corresponding to CA in the pseudobranch homogenate. Results of immunohistochemical technique revealed that CA was distributed within pseudobranch cells and more precisely in the apical parts (anti-vascular) of cells. The basal (vascular) parts of cells, tubular system, blood capillaries, and pillar cells were not immunostained. Immunocytochemistry confirmed these results and showed that some CA enzyme was cytoplasmic and the remainder was linked to membranous structures. The results also showed that the lacunar tissue layers did not display immunoperoxidase activity. Our results indicated that pseudobranch CA may have a function related to the extracellular medium wherein CA intervenes with the mechanism of stimulation of afferent nerve fibers.     

Ionized Calcium Measurement in Serum and Plasma by Ion Selective Electrodes: Comparison of Measured and Calculated Parameters

To determine the concentration of ionized calcium (iCa) collected in lithium heparin and gel tubes and to correlate the measured iCa with calculated iCa. Anaerobic fasting blood samples were simultaneously collected from healthy laboratory workers in lithium-heparin and gel tubes. iCa, pH, total calcium (CaT), total protein and albumin were measured. Ionized Ca was calculated with albumin and globulin values using an appropriate formula. Mean iCa in gel tubes showed a positive constant bias of 0.08 mmol/L (p < 0.001) when compared to lithium heparin results. The mean pH of blood taken in lithium heparin and gel tubes was non-significant (p = 0.3). Measured iCa poorly correlated with CaT (r = 0.2, p = 0.1) and calculated iCa (r = 0.2, p = 0.2). To evaluate the calcium status direct measurement of iCa must be done rather than using the formulae for iCa determination. In addition serum is recommended as the choice of sample for iCa determination in comparison to plasma samples.     

Factors influencing Malaysian public attitudes to agro-biotechnology

Despite considerable research in advanced countries on public perceptions of and attitudes to modern biotechnology, limited effort has been geared towards developing a structural model of public attitudes to modern biotechnology. The purpose of this paper is to identify the relevant factors influencing public attitudes towards genetically modified (GM) soybean, and to analyze the relationship between all the attitudinal factors. A survey was carried out on 1,017 respondents from various stakeholder groups in the Klang Valley region. Results of the survey have confirmed that attitudes towards complex issues such as biotechnology should be seen as a multifaceted process. The most important factors predicting support for GM soybean are the specific application-linked perceptions about the benefits, acceptance of risk and moral concern while risk and familiarity are significant predictors of benefit and risk acceptance. Attitudes towards GM soybean are also predicted by several general classes of attitude.