Moringa oleifera Lam., a medium sized tree species has gained importance due to its multipurpose usage and well adaptability to dry and hot climates of north-western plains, central India and dry regions of peninsular India. This species is reported in this paper for distribution of diversity and genetic resources value in different parts of the country. Information on diversification in use viz. regional importance has been included to broaden the scope for value addition, identification of potential value and use in plant genetic resource programmes.

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In this paper, we report titanium carbide formation on a titanium metal substrate by using a 3.3 kJ Mather-type dense plasma focus (DPF) device equipped with a graphite carbon source. The titanium substrate is inserted from the top of the plasma chamber and is irradiated by argon and carbon ions produced in multiple shots of DPF. X-ray diffraction spectra of the layer formed on the titanium substrate with 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 shots at a typical distance of 2.5 cm from the top of the anode show peaks corresponding mostly to titanium carbide. The surface morphology and hardness of the layer formed have been investigated using a scanning electron microscope and a Knoop microhardness tester, respectively.

Pb(Zr0.53Ti0.47)O3 (PZT) thin films have been successfully deposited on glass, silicon and ITO coated glass substrates by a 3.3 kJ Mather type dense plasma focus device. The x-ray diffraction spectra of the films deposited on glass substrates kept at a distance of 4.2 cm from the top of the anode with 10, 15 and 25 shots show peaks at 2θ = 31.3° corresponding to the perovskite phase of PZT. Transmission electron microscopy shows the presence of 0.5 nm grains of PZT. The leakage current density is found to be 10−6 A cm−2 at a reverse voltage of 1 V, from current density–voltage (J–V) characteristics. The capacitance–voltage (C–V) characteristics show a counter-clockwise hysteresis loop with a memory window of 1.2 V. The ferroelectric characteristic has been confirmed using the polarization–field hysteresis loop. The resistance of the film is about 1 GΩ. The spontaneous polarization, remanent polarization and coercive field values are found to be 20.1 µC cm−2, 8.6 µC cm−2 and 79.9 kV cm−1, respectively.

Cyclooxygenase (COX) enzymes catalyse the biosynthesis of prostaglandins and thromboxane from arachidonic acid (AA). We summarize in this paper, the development of pharmacophores of a dataset of inhibitors for COX-2 by using the Catalyst/Hypogen module using six chemically diverse series of compounds. Training set consisting of 24 compounds was carefully selected. The activity spread of the training set molecules was from 0.1 to 10000 nM. The most predictive pharmacophore model (hypothesis 1), consisting of four features, namely, one hydrogen bond donor, one hydrogen bond acceptor, one hydrophobic aliphatic and one ring aromatic feature, had a correlation (r) of 0.954 and a root mean square deviation of 0.894. The entropy (configuration cost) value of the hypotheses was 16.79, within the allowed range. The difference between the null hypothesis and the fixed cost and between the null hypothesis and the total cost of the best hypothesis (hypothesis 1) was 88.37 and 78.51, respectively. The model was validated on a test set consisting of six different series of structurally diverse 22 compounds and performed well in classifying active and inactive molecules correctly. This validation approach provides confidence in the utility of the predictive pharmacophore model developed in this work as a 3D query tool in the virtual screening of drug like molecules to retrieve new chemical entities as potent COX-2 inhibitors. The model can also be used to predict the biological activities of compounds prior to their costly and time-consuming synthesis.