Current Science

Livleen Shukla ¹, Ansuman Senapati ¹, S. P. Tyagi ¹, Anil Kumar Saxena ¹

Affiliations
1 Division of Microbiology, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110 012, IN

Abstract

A consortium of four hypercellulolytic fungal cultures, namely Aspergillus awamori, Trichoderma viride, Aspergillus nidulans and Phanerochaete chrysosporium was optimized for compost production on the basis of their lignocellulolytic enzyme production potential. The consortium has been effectively used for composting of diverse agricultural wastes such as paddy straw, soybean trash, pearl millet, maize residues and mustard stover. The inoculum of four fungi needs to be produced in bulk for talc-based consortium formulation. Routinely fungus is grown on potato dextrose agar medium, malt extract agar medium or Martin's Rose Bengal agar medium, which escalates the cost of production because of relatively expensive ingredients. Further, harvesting of fungal biomass from solid surface adds additional cost to the production schedule.

Keywords

Compost Production, Fungal Mats, Jaggery, Lignocellulolytic Enzyme, Spores.

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Prassan Choudhary ¹, Hillol Chakdar ¹, Dikchha Singh ¹, Chandrabose Selvaraj ², Sanjeev Kumar Singh ², Sunil Kumar ³, Anil Kumar Saxena ¹

Affiliations
1 ICAR-National Bureau of Agriculturally Important Microorganisms, Kushmaur, Mau 275 103, IN
2 Department of Bioinformatics, Alagappa University, Karaikudi 630 003, IN
3 Centre for Agricultural Bioinformatics, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi 110 002, IN

Abstract

In this study, we screened 26 bioactive compounds present in various spices for activity against SARS-CoV-2 using molecular docking. Results showed that piperine, present in black pepper had a high binding affinity (–7.0 kCal/mol) than adenosine monophos-phate (–6.4 kCal/mol) towards the RNA-binding pock-et of the nucleocapsid. Molecular dynamics simulation of the docked complexes confirmed the stability of piperine docked to nucleocapsid protein as a potential inhibitor of the RNA-binding site. Therefore, piperine seems to be potential candidate to inhibit the packag-ing of RNA in the nucleocapsid and thereby inhibiting the viral proliferation. This study suggests that consumption of black pepper may also help to combat SARS-CoV-2 directly through possible antiviral effects, besides its immunomodulatory functions.

Keywords

Binding Affinity, Black Pepper, COVID-19, Homology Modelling, Piperine.

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