Fusarium head blight (FHB) is one of the most important diseases that occurs in cereal regions worldwide and causes serious economic damage. This disease can be caused by several Fusarium species with Fusarium graminearum sensu stricto being the most common pathogen isolated from several crops. The aim of this study was to report the occurrence of F. graminearum sensu stricto on rye grains collected from field samples in Argentina and to determine the potential ability to produce deoxynivalenol (DON), nivalenol (NIV) and zearalenone (ZEA). Based on morphological characteristics, the isolate was identified as F. graminearum sensu stricto. To confirm molecularly, portions of the RED and TRI genes were sequenced and showed 99% similarity with the F. graminearum sensu stricto sequences available in the NCBI database. The potential to produce DON, 15-acetyldeoxynivalenol (15-ADON) and ZEA was determined. Moreover, Koch´s postulates were carried out. To our knowledge, this is the first report of F. graminearum sensu stricto associated with rye kernels in Argentina.

Viral diseases have caused devastating effect on poultry industry leading to significant losses in economy of world. In the presented study, the ability of Newcastle disease virus (NDV), infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) and avian influenza virus (AIV) to grow in two cell lines was evaluated. Both chicken embryo fibroblast (CEF) and DF-1 cells were used and cytopathic effects (CPE) produced by these viruses were observed. The titer of virus in terms of TCID50 was determined after 24h up to four days for each virus. The same type of CPE was observed for all viruses used in the study in both DF-1 and CEF cells. IBDV showed CPE causing rounding of cells while NDV caused formation of multicellular large nuclei, cell fusion and rounding of cells. Giant cells with inclusions and aggregation of cells with intact monolayer was observed for AIV. In growth kinetic study, higher titer of IBDV and NDV was observed in CEF cells than DF-1 cells while for AIV, DF-1 cells showed higher titer than CEF cells. These results would be useful for furthers comparative studies on growth of different cell lines of various viruses to find a suitability for vaccine production.

Audio data compression is used to reduce the transmission bandwidth and storage requirements of audio data. It is the second stage in the audio mastering process with audio equalization being the first stage. Compression algorithms such as BSAC, MP3 and AAC are used as standards in this paper. The challenge faced in audio compression is compressing the signal at low bit rates. The previous algorithms which work well at low bit rates cannot be dominant at higher bit rates and vice-versa. This paper proposes an altered form of vector quantization algorithm which produces a scalable bit stream which has a number of fine layers of audio fidelity. This modified form of the vector quantization algorithm is used to generate a perceptually audio coder which is scalable and uses the quantization and encoding stages which are responsible for the psychoacoustic and arithmetical terminations that are actually detached as practically all the data detached during the prediction phases at the encoder side is supplemented towards the audio signal at decoder stage. Therefore, clearly the quantization phase which is modified to produce a bit stream which is scalable. This modified algorithm works well at both lower and higher bit rates. Subjective evaluations were done by audio professionals using the MUSHRA test and the mean normalized scores at various bit rates was noted and compared with the previous algorithms.

This research proposes a method to enhance the payload message by embedding messages on the dilated edge areas by the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. To add security aspects to messages, messages are not embedded directly on the LSB but encrypted with XOR operations with Most Significant Bit (MSB). The experimental results of the test in this study showed that the dilation process to some extent can increase the payload of 18.65% and the average bpp is 1.42 while maintaining the imperceptibilty quality of stego image with an average PSNR value of about 47 dB, SSIM is 0.9977 and MSE is 1.13.

The presented article is a report on progress in photovoltaic devices and material processing. A cadmium telluride solar cell as one of the most attractive option for thin-film polycrystalline cell constructions is presented. All typical manufacturing steps of this device, including recrystalisation and junction activation are explained. A new potential field of application for this kind of device - the BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaic) is named and discussed. All possible configuration options for this application, according to material properties and exploitation demands are considered. The experimental part of the presented paper is focused on practical implementation of the high- temperature polymer foil as the substrate of the newly designed device by the help of ICSVT (Isothermal Close Space Vapour Transport) technique. The evaluation of the polyester and polyamide foils according to the ICSVT/CSS manufacturing process parameters is described and discussed. A final conclusion on practical verification of these materials is also given.