Anticancer activities of fatty acids and their heterocyclic derivatives

Traditional chemotherapy relies on the premise that rapidly proliferating cancer cells are more likely to be killed by a cytotoxic agent, but in reality, the long-standing problem of chemotherapy is the lack of tumor-specific treatments. Apart from the impact on tumor cells, the drugs’ major limitation is their severe adverse side effects on normal cells and tissues. Nutritional and epidemiological studies have indicated that cancer progression is correlated with the consumption of fatty acids, but the exact mechanisms still remain unknown. In the first part of our review, we discussed the beneficial effects of free fatty acids (saturated and unsaturated) on the progress of carcinogenesis in different tumor cell lines. We presented various mechanisms proposed in the literature, which explain the possible impact on the cells metabolism. The second part describes modifications of different fatty acids with existing anticancer drugs and heterocyclic moieties by condensation reactions. Such conjugations increased the tissue selectivity and made chemotherapy potentially more effective and less toxic in in vivo and in vitro studies. This fatty acid modifications, which change the activity of compounds, their uptake selectivity and alter drug delivery methods, may be the key to unlocking true medical potential of fatty acids

Assessing the innervation of the dorsal wrist capsule using modified Sihler’s staining

Background: The aim of this study was to assess the innervation of the dorsal articular capsule of the wrist using modified Sihler’s staining. Materials and methods: Thirty dorsal wrist capsules were collected from 15 donors (both sides) within 12 hours of death. All the capsules were collected in the same manner — using the dorsal incision. The specimens were stained according to the protocol of the modified Sihler’s staining technique. The preserved capsules were analysed under 8–16× magnification of an optical microscope for the presence of major nerve trunks, their major and minor branches, and nerve connections. Results: The range of innervation visualised was that the posterior interosseous nerve innervated approximately 60% of the central part; the remaining area was innervated by the dorsal sensory branch of the radial nerve and medial antebrachial cutaneous nerve. The constant findings were the branches departing from the ulnar side of the posterior interosseous nerve and from the radial side, with an exception seen in 2 cases. A communicans branch between the posterior interosseous nerve and medial antebrachial cutaneous nerve was seen in all the specimens. The posterior interosseous nerve innervation extended beyond the level of the carpometacarpal joints II–V. Conclusions: The modified Sihler’s staining technique allows for transparent visibility of the nerves that innervate the dorsal wrist capsule. However, it does not allow as accurate assessment as does histological examination, especially regarding the evaluation of nerve endings. Nevertheless, this method provides a significantly larger area of nerve observation than is provided by histological examination

Role and task recommendation and social tagging to enable social business process management

Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) poses a number of limitations for the management of ad-hoc processes, where the execution paths are not designed a priori and evolve during enactment. Social BPM, which predicates to integrate social software into the BPM lifecycle, has emerged as an answer to such limitations. This paper presents a framework for social BPM in which social tagging is used to capture process knowledge emerging during the enactment and design of the processes. Process knowledge concerns both the type of activities chosen to fulfil a certain goal and the skills and experience of users in executing specific tasks. Such knowledge is exploited by recommendation tools to support the design and enactment of future process instances. We first provide an overview of our framework, introducing the concepts of role and task recommendations, which are supported by social tagging. These mechanisms are then elaborated further by an example. Eventually, we discuss a prototype of our framework enabling collaborative process design and execution

Design and Verification of Instantiable Compliance Rule Graphs in Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract. For enterprises it has become crucial to check compliance of their business processes with certain rules such as medical guidelines or financial regulations. When automating compliance checks on pro-cess models, existing approaches have mainly addressed process-specific compliance rules so far, i.e., rules that correspond to a particular pro-cess model. However, in practice, we will rather find process-independent compliance rules that are nevertheless to be checked over process models. Thus, in this paper, we present an approach that enables the instantiation and verification of process-independent compliance rules over process models using domain models. For this, we provide an intuitive visualiza-tion of compliance rules and compliance rule instances at user level and show how rules and instances can be formalized and verified at system level. The overall approach is validated by a pattern-based comparison to existing approaches and by means of a prototypical implementation.

Degradation, Bioactivity, and Osteogenic Potential of Composites Made of PLGA and Two Different Sol–Gel Bioactive Glasses

We have developed poly(l-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) based composites using sol–gel derived bioactive glasses (S-BG), previously described by our group, as composite components. Two different composite types were manufactured that contained either S2—high content silica S-BG, or A2—high content lime S-BG. The composites were evaluated in the form of sheets and 3D scaffolds. Sheets containing 12, 21, and 33 vol.% of each bioactive glass were characterized for mechanical properties, wettability, hydrolytic degradation, and surface bioactivity. Sheets containing A2 S-BG rapidly formed a hydroxyapatite surface layer after incubation in simulated body fluid. The incorporation of either S-BG increased the tensile strength and Young’s modulus of the composites and tailored their degradation rates compared to starting compounds. Sheets and 3D scaffolds were evaluated for their ability to support growth of human bone marrow cells (BMC) and MG-63 cells, respectively. Cells were grown in non-differentiating, osteogenic or osteoclast-inducing conditions. Osteogenesis was induced with either recombinant human BMP-2 or dexamethasone, and osteoclast formation with M-CSF. BMC viability was lower at higher S-BG content, though specific ALP/cell was significantly higher on PLGA/A2-33 composites. Composites containing S2 S-BG enhanced calcification of extracellular matrix by BMC, whereas incorporation of A2 S-BG in the composites promoted osteoclast formation from BMC. MG-63 osteoblast-like cells seeded in porous scaffolds containing S2 maintained viability and secreted collagen and calcium throughout the scaffolds. Overall, the presented data show functional versatility of the composites studied and indicate their potential to design a wide variety of implant materials differing in physico-chemical properties and biological applications. We propose these sol–gel derived bioactive glass–PLGA composites may prove excellent potential orthopedic and dental biomaterials supporting bone formation and remodeling

Social Software and Semantics for Business Process Management - Alternative or Synergy?

Business Process Management (BPM) provides support for managing organizations’ processes and facilitates their adaptation to changing market conditions. Although various BPM solutions have been successfully applied in industry, there are still many open issues to be addressed, e.g., ensuring commitment of employees in process modelling and reengineering or enabling automation of business processes lifecycle. Researchers are currently investigating the use of Semantic Web and Social Software technologies to overcome the existing problems. Based on the conducted study, we argue that although semantics and Social Software technologies focus on different problems, they may be combined as utilized together they enable organizations to advance their processes and adapt faster to changing market conditions

Brown bear – a state of tourists' and secondary school students' knowledge and a necessity of an environmental education

The paper analyses knowledge of secondary school pupils from Ustrzyki Dolne and tourists visiting the Bieszczady National Park. Both groups were surveyed in 2011−2012. Tourists and pupils were well−informed about the presence of brown bear in the Bieszczady (96%), but far less about its distribution in other mountain ranges. Nearly 30% of the questioned tourists were not aware of the fact that leaving organic leftovers is not allowed in bear habitats and both groups had problems with indicating the actual dangers for the population of brown bear in Poland. The most frequent reported damages caused by bears in Poland such as damages in apiaries were indicated by small number of pupils (6%), while the majority pointed out attacks on human (44%) and damages in households (21%). About 31% of pupils wrongly stated that fishes are often eaten by bears in Poland. Only a few of them (4%) wrote about leftovers as a possible source of food for bears. The research indicates that it is urgent to enhance a knowledge about a distribution of brown bear in Poland and a correct waste management in areas where bears are present

A Hybrid Approach to Domain-Specific Entity Linking

The current state-of-the-art Entity Linking (EL) systems are geared towards corpora that are as heterogeneous as the Web, and therefore perform sub-optimally on domain-specific corpora. A key open problem is how to construct effective EL systems for specific domains, as knowledge of the local context should in principle increase, rather than decrease, effectiveness. In this paper we propose the hybrid use of simple specialist linkers in combination with an existing generalist system to address this problem. Our main findings are the following. First, we construct a new reusable benchmark for EL on a corpus of domain-specific conversations. Second, we test the performance of a range of approaches under the same conditions, and show that specialist linkers obtain high precision in isolation, and high recall when combined with generalist linkers. Hence, we can effectively exploit local context and get the best of both worlds

LocLinkVis: A Geographic Information Retrieval-Based System for Large-Scale Exploratory Search

In this paper we present LocLinkVis (Locate-Link-Visualize); a system which supports exploratory information access to a document collection based on geo-referencing and visualization. It uses a gazetteer which contains representations of places ranging from countries to buildings, and that is used to recognize toponyms, disambiguate them into places, and to visualize the resulting spatial footprints