Applied Research Journal

41-45

Authors: *Mohammed M. Aji, Babagana Gutti, Bitrus K. Highina and Shettima Abba Kyari

The fruits of canarium schweinfurthii are good source of oil, which can be extracted for various purposes. Extraction and characterization of oil from canarium schweinfurthii (Black date) fruits was achieved using solvent extraction method. The use of soxhlet extraction (Solvent extraction) gave a reasonable percentage of oil (51.2%) by weight in grams. Black date fruits contain high quality of oil. It contains fatty acid composed of oleic acid, linoleic acid, palmitic acid, stearic acid and others. The extracted and characterized oil has: density of 0.87g/cm3, specific gravity of 0.87g/cm3, flash point of 111⁰C , viscosity of 36cp at 29⁰C, saponification value of 125.4 mg/KOH/gram of oil, iodine value of 88.I2/100g of oil, peroxide value of 0.72ml/g of oil and free fatty acid content of 1.26%. These values are very close to those of the recommended codex standard for vegetable oil. Furthermore, the studied characteristics of the oil extracted shows that it may be used for many domestic and industrial purposes.

51-54

Authors: Deepika Srivastava and *Asheesh Shanker

Simple sequence repeats (SSRs), also known as microsatellites, are found in DNA sequences and consist of short repeating motifs of 1-6 nucleotides. These repeats are ubiquitous and play an important role in the development of molecular markers. Therefore, the present analysis was conducted to mine SSRs in chloroplast genome of Cocos nucifera. A total of 44 SSRs were identified in 154.731 kb sequence mined with an average length of 18.57 bp. Depending upon the repeat unit SSRs varied in length from 12 to 132 bp. The identified SSRs showed a density of 1SSR/3.52 kb. Mononucleotides (16, 36.36%) were found to be the most abundant repeat, followed by di and tetra nucleotide repeats with same frequency (9, 20.45%), tri and penta nucleotide repeats (4, 9.09%) and hexa nucleotide repeats (2, 4.55%). Compound SSRs were completely absent in the chloroplast genome of Cocos nucifera. Most of the perfect SSRs were confined in the non-coding region of the chloroplast genome.

59-66

Authors: Anubha Shukla, Adarsh Lalit, Vinay Sharma, Sharad Vats and *Afroz Alam

Millets are grown expansively in different areas of India as a staple crop to feed a huge section of the inhabitants. In India, its production holds the sixth position after wheat, rice, maize, sorghum and bajra. The most important cultivated species of millets in India are foxtail millet (Setaria italic), finger millet (Eleusine coracana), pearl or cattail millet (Pennisetum glaucum), proso millet (Panicum miliaceum), Japanese / barnyard millet (Echinochola crusgalli), brown top millet (Panicum ramosum) and kodo or ditch millet (Paspalum scrobiculatum). Among these, finger millet (Eleusine coracana L.) and pearl or cattail millet (Pennisetum glaucum) offers high nutritional, anti-diabetic and antioxidant properties. India is a socioeconomic meager country needs a large amount food grain to fulfill the requirement of its ever increasing population with good nutrients value. To facilitate an improved and healthy food supply, these easy growing vigorous crops would be a good option for the farmers in semiarid regions of India. The planned cultivation of these millets will provide a very nutritious and economical food for a large proportion of poor people.

71-79

Authors: * Omorogiuwa Eseosa, Oboma S.O

Due to huge number of power transformers yearly consumed and installed in the utility networks, it is always required and targeted to build transformers with the most reasonable cost. Achieving the guaranteed characteristics of transformers is an important factor that should be considered knowing that transformer design task is time consuming. In this work, a successful attempt for designing large size power transformer using non-linear programming (NLP) technique was presented. The mathematical transformer design formulation is explained in a systematic way for a typical power transformer. Optimization methodologies and implementation of results were also presented. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed mathematical formulation of transformer design problem and the reduction of total cost when compared to conventional designs.

91-96

Authors: M. A. Hakim, * Shahida Akhter, D. P. Paul and S. M. Hoque

Polycrystalline Cu1-xMgxFe2O4 (x=0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0) ferrites have been synthesized using solid-state reaction technique. Phase identification, morphology and magnetization measurements have been done by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), VSM and SQUID magnetometer. Formation of the cubic spinel structure was observed by XRD studies. Grain size is found to decrease with increasing Mg content and increase with increasing sintering temperature. Field dependence of magnetization was measured at 300 K and 5 K using VSM and SQUID magnetometer. Saturation magnetization (Ms) decreases with Mg content. The observed variation in Ms can be explained in terms of the cation redistribution between A and B sublattices. The substitution of Mg ions and effect of sintering temperature plays decisive role in changing structural and magnetic properties of Cu-Mg ferrites.