New insights on the utilization of ultrasonicated mustard seed cake: chemical composition and antagonistic potential for root-knot nematode,Meloidogyne javanica

This study focused, for the first time, on the effect of ultrasonic features on the extraction efficiency of secondary metabolites in mustard seed cake(MSC). The nematostatic potential of sonicated seed cake was examined against the second-stage juveniles(J2 s) of root-knot nematode, Meloidogyne javanica. The results show that a 35 ppm(parts per million) concentration of a sonicated extract(SE) sample of MSC caused 65% J2 s mortality at 18 h exposure period in vitro. It also significantly suppressed the root-knot index(RKI=0.94) in tomato roots. The lethal concentration values for SE were 51.76, 29.79, and 13.34 ppm,respectively, at 6, 12, and 18 h of the exposure period, and the lethal concentration values for the non-sonicated extract(NSE)sample were 116.95, 76.38, and 55.59 ppm, respectively, at similar exposure time. Sinapine and gluconapin were identified as the major compounds in ultrasonic-assisted MSC. Because of the high extraction efficiency of metabolites in the SE, all treatments of SE were shown to be antagonistic to J2 s. Thus, this study of ultrasonication activity-based profiling of MSC may help generate target-based compounds at a scale relevant to the control of disease caused by nematodes in economic crops.     

Getting ‘foolishly hot and bothered’? Parents and teachers and sex education in the 1940s

The reluctance of parents to provide sex education has been a problem for educators since the first attempts at the modernisation of sex education in the early twentieth century, yet the sexual needs, desires and fears of parents are rarely even mentioned in pedagogical debates. This article examines the intense anxiety and embarrassment felt by both parents and teachers when they tried to provide sex education in mid-twentieth-century England. The gendered sexual cultures of women and men and the way in which these shaped responses to the pubertal experience of girls and boys are described. Sex education was a rational progressive discourse; the response of sex educators to resistance and rejection of what they offered was to present ‘rational’ arguments explaining that these anxieties are unnecessary and can thus be abandoned. Waves of popular emotion concerning child sexual abuse since the 1980s demonstrate the continuing relevance of this fear and anxiety, emotions that shaped the course of sex education over the past century.