The phenotypic diversity and fruit characterization of winter squash (Cucurbita maxima) populations from the Black Sea Region of Turkey

Winter squash are one of the most important Cucurbit crops in Turkey. Winter squash populations show great diversity in morphological characteristics, particularly fruit length, fruit diameter, fruit shape, fruit brightness, skin thickness , flesh thickness and colour in the Black Sea region of Turkey. In this research, 115 populations of winter squash, Cucurbita maxima Duch, were collected from different provinces of the Black Sea region in 2006 and 2007 and phenotypic diversity in their fruit characters was assessed. The collection showed appreciable phenotypicvariation in fruit shape, fruit colour, fruit brightness, fruit dimension and fruit weight. Cluster and principal component analysis (PCA) were performed to determine relationships among populations and to obtain information on the usefulness of those fruit characters for the definitionof groups. Cluster analysis based on 14 quantitative and 7 qualitative variables identified 10 different groups. The first five principal component axes accounted for 65.0% of the total multivariate variation among the populations. The greater part of variance was accounted for byfruit weight, fruit diameter, fruit length, length of seed cavity and flesh thickness. This evaluation of fruit trait variability can assist geneticists and breeders to identify populations with desirable characteristics for inclusion in variety breeding programs

Endoscopic Removal of an Unusual Foreign Body Causing Gastrointestinal Bleeding

Foreign body ingestion is a condition more common in the pediatric population than in adults. In adults, although foreign body ingestion can be well tolerated, approximately 10-20% of patients require endoscopic intervention. Delayed diagnosis and unremoved foreign bodies can cause serious and fatal complications including perforation, fistula and gastrointestinal bleeding. Here we report a patient with bleeding duodenal ulcer thought to be initiated by a large foreign body

Polymorphisms in the tumor necrosis factor-alpha gene in Turkish women with pre-eclampsia and eclampsia

PubMedID: 17593951The genetic background predisposing pregnant women to pre-eclampsia/ eclampsia (PE/E) is still unknown. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether there is an association between the TNF-alpha-308 and 850 polymorphisms and PE or eclampsia. In this study, 40 cases of eclampsia, 113 cases of PE and 80 normotensive control cases were genotyped for the TNF-alpha-G-308A and C-850 polymorphisms. At position 308, the replacement of Guanine with Adenosine was denoted as TNF2. We found a significant difference between the TNF2 allele frequencies of the eclamptic, pre-eclamptic and normotensive controls. TNF2 (AA) polymorphism frequency was significantly higher among the eclamptics and pre-eclamptics (control: 5%, PE: 13.3%, E: 12.9%). A significantly different genotype distribution of C-850T polymorphism was observed between the PE/E and control groups, with the frequency of the variant TT genotype being significantly reduced in the preeclamptics (PE: 17%; E: 17.5%) when compared with the control group (24.3%). We have demonstrated an association between TNF-? polymorphisms and pre-eclampsia susceptibility. However, it is not known whether C-850T polymorphism has a functional effect on the TNF-? gene. In addition, it was not possible to determine whether this polymorphism promotes the progression from PE to eclampsia because of no statistically significant difference between eclampsia and the controls. Copyright© 2007 by Okayama University Medical School

A Prospective, Randomized Study Comparing 7-day and 14-day Quadruple Therapies as First-line Treatments for Helicobacter pylori Infection in Patients with Functional Dyspepsia

Objective: Standard triple therapy for Helicobacter pylori has a low eradication rate in Turkey. The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of 7-day and 14-day lansoprazole, amoxicillin, clarithromycin, and bismuth subsalicylate (LACB) treatment regimens as first-line H. pylori eradication therapies. Materials and Methods: This study included 70 patients with symptoms of dyspepsia and a positive H. pylori stool antigen test (SAT). Thirty-five patients received the modified quadruple therapy regimen for 7 days (LACB-7) whereas the remaining 35 patients received the treatment for 14 days (LACB-14). Eradication was assessed by SAT 1 month after the end of therapy. Results: A total of 64 patients completed the therapy. The cumulative per-protocol (PP) and intention-to-treat (ITT) eradication rates were 89% (n = 57/64) and 81.4% (n = 57/70), respectively. Both the PP and ITT eradication rates were superior in the LACB-14 group, compared with the LACB-7 group (PP: 90.6% vs. 87.5%; ITT: 81.4% vs. 80%, respectively), but these differences were not statistically significant (P = 0.689). Conclusions: Both the 7-day and 14-day first-line LACB therapies provided a high cure rate, were well tolerated, and were equally effective against H. pylori infection in Turkey

An improved Gbest guided artificial bee colony (IGGABC) algorithm for classification and prediction tasks

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) performance depends on network topology, activation function, behaviors of data, suitable synapse\u27s values and learning algorithms. Many existing works used different learning algorithms to train ANN for getting high performance. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the latest successfully Swarm Intelligence based technique for training Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). Normally Gbest Guided Artificial Bee Colony (GGABC) algorithm has strong exploitation process for solving mathematical problems, however the poor exploration creates problems like slow convergence and trapping in local minima. In this paper, the Improved Gbest Guided Artificial Bee Colony (IGGABC) algorithm is proposed for finding global optima. The proposed IGGABC algorithm has strong exploitation and exploration processes. The experimental results show that IGGABC algorithm performs better than that standard GGABC, BP and ABC algorithms for Boolean data classification and time-series prediction tasks