Do Life Skills Education has come into Action?

The vast majority of adolescents (88 per cent) live in developing countries. India has the largest national population of adolescents (243 million) comprising one fourth of the population.1 Significant proportion of adolescents has poor level of life-skills and they are not sufficient to deal with the demands of modern society.2 With advanced & complex life style, traditional mechanisms to incorporate life skills may no longer be adequate. Life skills hitherto should be included to curriculum. What are life skills? Life skills are problem solving behaviors used appropriately and responsibly in the management of personal affairs. UNICEF lists 10 life skills as most important under the domain of psychosocial and interpersonal skills. These are problem solving skills, critical thinking skills, effective communication skills, decision making, creative thinking, interpersonal relationship skills, self-awareness building skills, empathy and coping with stress and emotions

Enriched multi objective optimization model based cloud disaster recovery

AbstractIn cloud computing massive data storage is one of the great challenging tasks in term of reliable storage of sensitive data and quality of storage service. Among various cloud safety issues, the data disaster recovery is the most significant issue which is required to be considered. Thus, in this paper, analysis of massive data storage process in the cloud environment is performed and the massive data storage cost is based on the data storage price, communication cost and data migration cost. The data storage reliability involves of data transmission, hardware dependability and reliability. Reliable massive storage is proposed by using Enriched Multi Objective Optimization Model (EMOOM). The main objective of this proposed optimization model is using Enriched Genetic Algorithm (EGA) for efficient Disaster Recovery in a cloud environment. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed EMOOM model is effective and positive and reliable

A prospective, open label, randomized study of efficacy of vitamin A as an add on therapy in the clinical outcome of tuberculosis patients

Background: Tuberculosis is the most prevalent infectious disease in the world. India accounts for nearly one fifth of global incidence of tuberculosis. If untreated the disease may be fatal within five years in 50-65 percent of cases. Many decades of research have shown that severe oxidative stress plays a significant role in tuberculosis patients. Moreover, the malnutrition which is commonly present in patient with tuberculosis can add to the impaired anti oxidant capacity. The present study was to investigate the effect of supplementation of vitamin A with standard treatment on the health status of newly diagnosed sputum positive pulmonary tuberculosis patients.Methods: Phase III, prospective, open, two arm parallel group, outpatient, randomized, active controlled study. Centre of the study was Tuberculosis clinic, Department of Internal medicine, Stanley Medical College Chennai.Duration of the study was for active drug therapy - 2 months, for follow up period - 4 months and for total period - 6 months.Results: In our study it was evident that there was a statistically significant improvement in the Karnofsky’s score, body mass index, mid upper arm circumference in the in the vitamin A supplementation group when compared to the control group at the end of 2 months and 6 months. And also, a statistically significant decrease in C.R.P. levels and E.S.R levels were also observed.Conclusions: This study shows that vitamin A as an add on therapy with regular anti-tuberculosis treatment improves the quality of life and decreases the disease activity in pulmonary tuberculosis patients to a greater extent than with routine standard drug therapy alone

A prospective open label study of efficacy and tolerability of topical tacrolimus in Vitiligo

Background: Vitiligo is a cosmetically and psychologically devastating clinical conundrum with various hypotheses of etiology inclusive of an immunological one too. Long term clinical visits, various adverse effects and cost of therapy are the major limitations of current treatment of vitiligo. Topical Tacrolimus which has been tried and found useful in various skin conditions with immunological basis was evaluated for its efficacy and tolerability compared with the available standard treatment of Topical Betamethasone.Methods: The study was done in the outpatient unit of Department of Dermatology, Stanley medical college, for duration of six months. Newly diagnosed vitiligo patients attending the outpatient clinic were taken for the study. A randomised, open labelled, comparative study of efficacy and tolerability of Topical Tacrolimus in vitiligo was done.Results: Early onset of repigmentation, higher mean repigmentation with no significant side effects systemically or topically were observed in the study group compared to the control group.Conclusions: This study shows that Topical Tacrolimus produces rapid and significant repigmentation with less significant side effects in vitiligo. Topical Tacrolimus is more efficacious and better tolerated than available standard Topical Betamethasone

Carbohydrate specificity and salt-bridge mediated conformational change in acidic winged bean agglutinin

Structures of two crystal forms of the dimeric acidic winged bean agglutinin (WBAII) complexed with methyl-α-D-galactose have been determined at 3.0 Å and 3.3 Å resolution. The subunit structure and dimerisation of the lectin are similar to those of the basic lectin from winged bean (WBAI) and the lectin from Erythrina corallodendron (EcorL). The conformation of a loop and its orientation with respect to the rest of the molecule in WBAII are, however, different from those in all the other legume lectins of known structure. This difference appears to have been caused by the formation of two strategically placed salt bridges in the former. Modelling based on the crystal structures provides a rationale for the specificity of the lectin, which is very different from that of WBAI, for the H-antigenic determinant responsible for O blood group reactivity. It also leads to a qualitative explanation for the thermodynamic data on sugar-binding to the lectin, with special emphasis on the role of a tyrosyl residue in the variable loop in the sugar-binding region in generating the carbohydrate specificity of WBAII

Plasmepsin inhibitors: design, synthesis, inhibitory studies and crystal structure analysis

Plasmepsin group of enzymes are key enzymes in the life cycle of malarial parasites. As inhibition of plasmepsins leads to the parasite's death, these enzymes can be utilized as potential drug targets. Although many drugs are available, it has been observed that Plasmodium falciparum, the species that causes most of the malarial infections and subsequent death, has developed resistance against most of the drugs. Based on the cleavage sites of hemglobin, the substrate for plasmepsins, we have designed two compounds (p-nitrobenzoyl-leucine-β -alanine and p-nitrobenzoyl-leucine-isonipecotic acid), synthesized them, solved their crystal structures and studied their inhibitory effect using experimental and theoretical (docking) methods. In this paper, we discuss the synthesis, crystal structures and inhibitory nature of these two compounds which have a potential to inhibit plasmepsins

Structural plasticity of peanut lectin: an X-ray analysis involving variation in pH, ligand binding and crystal structure

Until recently, it has only been possible to grow crystals of peanut lectin when complexed with sugar ligands. It is now shown that it is possible to grow peanut lectin crystals at acidic pH in the presence of oligopeptides corresponding to a loop in the lectin molecule. Crystals have also been prepared in the presence of these peptides as well as lactose. Low-pH crystal forms of the lectin-lactose complex similar to those obtained at neutral pH have also been grown. Thus, crystals of peanut lectin grown under different environmental conditions, at two pH values with and without sugar bound to the lectin, are now available. They have been used to explore the plasticity and hydration of the molecule. A detailed comparison between different structures shows that the lectin molecule is sturdy and that the effect of changes in pH, ligand binding and environment on it is small. The region involving the curved front β-sheet and the loops around the second hydrophobic core is comparatively rigid. The back β-sheet involved in quaternary association, which exhibits considerable variability, is substantially flexible, as is the sugar-binding region. The numbers of invariant water molecules in the hydration shell are small and they are mainly involved in metal coordination or in stabilizing unusual structural features. Small consistent movements occur in the combining site upon sugar binding, although the site is essentially preformed

A Machine learning Classification approach for detection of Covid 19 using CT images

Coronavirus disease 2019 popularly known as COVID 19 was first found in Wuhan, China in December 2019. World Health Organization declared Covid 19 as a transmission disease. The symptoms were cough, loss of taste, fever, tiredness, respiratory problem. These symptoms were likely to show within 11 –14 days. The RT-PCR and rapid antigen biochemical tests were done for the detection of COVID 19. In addition to biochemical tests, X-Ray and Computed Tomography (CT) images are used for the minute details of the severity of the disease. To enhance efficiency and accuracy of analysis/detection of COVID images and to reduce of doctors' time for analysis could be addressed through Artificial Intelligence. The dataset from Kaggle was utilized to analyze. The statistical and GLCM features were extracted from CT images for the classification of COVID and NON-COVID instances in this study. CT images were used to extract statistical and GLCM features for categorization. In the proposed/prototype model, we achieved the classification accuracy of 91%, and 94.5% using SVM and Random Forest respectively

Crystal structure of the peanut lectin - T-antigen complex. Carbohydrate specificity generated by water bridges

Peanut lectin binds with high specificity to the tumour­ associated disaccharide GaI.81-3GaINAc, generally known as T-antigen. The crystal structure of the complex of the lectin with the disaccharide has been determined at 2.5 A resolution. Comparison of the structure with that of the corresponding complex with lactose reveals that the specificity of the lectin for T-antigen is generated primarily by two specific water­ mediated interactions, probably the first instance where water-bridges have been demonstrated to be responsi­ ble for generating specificity in protein-carbohydrate interactions. The elucidation of the structure of peanut lectin- T -antigen complex also provides a framework for exploring peanut lectin-based prognosis and diag­ nosis of certain types of carcinoma