Silybum marianum (Milk Thistle): Review on Its chemistry, morphology, ethno medical uses, phytochemistry and pharmacological activities

The oldest remedies identified to mankind are herbal medicines. India is recognized worldwide for its Ayurvedic treatment. India has rich history of using many plants for medicinal purposes. Remedial plants are cooperating extremely dynamic position in customary drugs for the action of a variety of illness. However a key obstacle, which has hindered the promotion in use of alternative medicines in the developed countries, is no evidence of documentation and absence of stringent quality control measures. There is a demand for the evidence of every investigate effort execute on conventional remedies in the appearance of certification. The purpose of current review is to make accessible up-to-date information on, botany, morphology, ecological biodiversity, therapeutic uses, phytochemistry and pharmacological activities on diverse parts of Silybum marianum (L.) Gaertn (S. marianum). This review was assembled using technical literature from electronic search engine such as Springer link, Bio Med Central, Pub Med, Scopus, Science Direct, Scielo, Medline and Science domain. Supplementary texts were obtained from books, book chapters, dissertations, websites and other scientific publications. S. marianum a member of the Asteraceae family, is a tall herb with large prickly white veined green leaves and a reddish-purple flower that ends in sharp spines. It is native of the Mediterranean region and which has also spread in East Asia, Europe, Australia and America. Confident chemical constituents were exposed cognate as silybin A, silybin B, isosilybin A, isosilybin B, silychristin, silydianin, apigenin 7-O-β-(2″- O-α-rhamnosyl)galacturonide, kaempferol 3-O-α-rhamnoside-7-O-β-galacturonide, apigenin 7-O-β-glucuronide, apigenin 7-O-β-glucoside, apigenin 7-O-β-galactoside, kaempferol-3-O-α-rhamnoside, kaempferol, taxifolin and quercetin. The plant is exclusively used as anti-diabetic, hepatoprotective, hypocholesterolaemic, anti-hypertensive, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and as an anti-oxidant. Seeds of the plant are also used as an anti-spasmodic, neuroprotective, anti-viral, immunomodulant, cardioprotective, demulcent and anti-haemorrhagic. The plant is also serves as a galactagogue, agent that induces milk secretion and used in the treatment of uterine disorders. The plant is employed in dissimilar conventional schemes of remedy in the cure of different illness

Characterization of Chemical Compounds in Volatile Oil and Ethyl Acetate Extract of Lavandula angustifolia by GC-MS

Lavandula angustifolia is an important aromatic plant and rich source of linalool. L. angustifolia and its bioactive compounds have been reported to possess several bioactivities such as antioxidant, antifungal, antibacterial and antidiabetic etc. The aim of the present study is to characterize chemical compounds present in volatile oil and ethyl acetate extract of L. angustifolia aerial parts by gas chromatography mass spectroscopy (GC-MS). The hydrodistillation of aerial parts of L. angustifolia yielded 1.56±0.27% v/w volatile oil. The GC-MS analysis of volatile oil of L. angustifolia yielded 74 chemical compounds, and lavandulyl isobutyrate (52.61%), and linalool (5.41%) were identified as major compounds. Ultrasonication was utilized for extraction of L. angustifolia using ethyl acetate as solvent and extraction yield was found to be 3.59±0.73% w/w. The GC-MS analysis of ethyl acetate extract of L. angustifolia yielded 40 chemical compounds and the major compounds were dotriacontane (8.33%), linalool (7.09%), eucalyptol (6.42%), linalyl acetate (4.69%), 1,4-cineole (4.62%), and trans-linalool oxide (4.51%). The present study explores the chemical composition of volatile oil and ethyl acetate extract of L. angustifolia

A CRITICAL REVIEW ON POTENTIAL PHARMACOLOGICAL AND PHYTOCHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF GYMNEMA SYLVESTRE R. Br.

This review aims to present the potential information related to pharmacological actions and chemical composition of Gymnema sylvestre R.Br. (Asclepiadaceae), which is used in many Asian countries as a traditional medicine especially for the treatment of diabetes mellitus. Our main objective was to collect information about pharmacological actions and active constituents of this plant. Review of literature included PubMed, Science Direct searches with ‘Gymnema sylvestre’ and ‘gurmar’ as initial key words. The search was further refined by looking for terms such as ‘Constituents’ (or composition) and ‘Activity’ (or effect) within the results. The major bioactive constituents of G. sylvestre are a group of triterpenoid glycosides known as gymnemic acids with gymnemagenin as common aglycone. G. sylvestre has good prospects in the treatment of diabetes as it shows positive effects on blood sugar homeostasis, controls sugar cravings, and promotes regeneration of pancreas. The herbal extract is used in dietary supplements because it reduces body weight, blood cholesterol, and triglyceride levels. The G. sylvestre is a rich source of chemically novel compounds and needs elaborate screening strategies to dwell into the pharmacological effects of its phyto-constituents at the molecular level

Characterising food insecurity in pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in Uganda using a consumption coping strategy index

We explore the utility of a consumption coping strategy index (CSI) in characterising and assessing the factors influencing household food insecurity. We assessed 53 pastoral and 197 agro-pastoral households in Nakasongola and Nakaseke districts of Uganda, examining the use of 27 consumption coping strategies over a recall time of two 30-day periods, one at the start of a dry season in 2012 and one at the start of a rainy season in 2013. Four categorical food insecurity status measures were established - food secure (CSI 0 to 5) and mildly (CSI 6 to 20), moderately (CSI 21 to 42) and extremely (CSI >42) food insecure. For the dry season, the mean CSI was 29.4 ± 2.59 and 33.6 % of households were food secure, while for the rains, mean CSI was 33.1 ± 2.30 and 14.0 % of households were food secure. The combination of livelihood system, land holdings, number of livestock owned and belonging to a social network explained 9.4 % to 10 % of the variance in household food insecurity for agro-pastoralists, but variance for pastoralists was not explained by these factors. While the only highly significant factor associated with increasing household food insecurity in the dry season was low landholdings, in the rainy season, it was pastoral livelihood, low livestock holdings for agro-pastoralists and non-involvement in social networks. While our model identified a number of factors important in describing household food insecurity, it explained only about 10 % of the variance

Machine Learning Approaches to Identify Patient Comorbidities and Symptoms That Increased Risk of Mortality in COVID-19

Providing appropriate care for people suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the pandemic SARS-CoV-2 virus, is a significant global challenge. Many individuals who become infected may have pre-existing conditions that may interact with COVID-19 to increase symptom severity and mortality risk. COVID-19 patient comorbidities are likely to be informative regarding the individual risk of severe illness and mortality. Determining the degree to which comorbidities are associated with severe symptoms and mortality would thus greatly assist in COVID-19 care planning and provision. To assess this we performed a meta-analysis of published global literature, and machine learning predictive analysis using an aggregated COVID-19 global dataset. Our meta-analysis suggested that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cerebrovascular disease (CEVD), cardiovascular disease (CVD), type 2 diabetes, malignancy, and hypertension as most significantly associated with COVID-19 severity in the current published literature. Machine learning classification using novel aggregated cohort data similarly found COPD, CVD, CKD, type 2 diabetes, malignancy, and hypertension, as well as asthma, as the most significant features for classifying those deceased versus those who survived COVID-19. While age and gender were the most significant predictors of mortality, in terms of symptom–comorbidity combinations, it was observed that Pneumonia–Hypertension, Pneumonia–Diabetes, and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS)–Hypertension showed the most significant associations with COVID-19 mortality. These results highlight the patient cohorts most likely to be at risk of COVID-19-related severe morbidity and mortality, which have implications for prioritization of hospital resource

GCMS Analysis and Hypolipidemic Activity of Dioscorea bulbifera (L) in High Fat Diet Induced Hypercholesterolemic Rats

Background and Objective: Hypercholesterolemia is the leading cause of the development of various diseases that made pharmaceutical companies turn towards herbal products with fewer side effects. Hyperlipidemic and reactive oxygen species in the body are important factors for the development of cardiovascular disease such as hypercholesterolemia. The present study investigated the phytochemical analysis using GCMS and hypolipidemic activity of ethanolic extract of D. bulbifera tubers. Materials and Methods: In the present study, the 70% ethanolic extract of D. bulbifera tubes are attempted to evaluate for the cardio-protective activity and hypolipidemic activity in High fat diet-induced hyperlipidaemia along with the phytochemical evaluation of the same extract by the GC-MS analysis. Results: The results showed that 50 mg kg–1 b.wt., ofD. bulbiferaextract treatment for seven days decreases the level of cholesterol and LDL significantly (p<0.05). Likewise, 30 days of treatment with 50 mg kg–1 b.wt., of D. bulbifera extract exhibits cardioprotective activity in high-fat diet-induced hyperlipidemic rats by increasing HDL cholesterol (p<0.05) and decreasing the total cholesterol, LDL and triglycerides (p<0.05). GC-MS analysis of methanolic fraction from 70% ethanolic extract ofD. bulbifera showed the presence of fatty acids in higher concentrations. Conclusion: The D. bulbifera exhibits hypolipidemic and cardio-protective activity in high-fat diet-induced diseased animals

A Critical Review on Potential Pharmacological Activity and Pharmacokinetic Perspective of Swertiamarin

Swertiamarin is a secoiridoid glycoside found extensively in Enicostemma littorale and Swertia chirata belonging to the family of Gentianaceae, which has been reported to cure many diseases including diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, arthritis, malaria and abdominal ulcers. The present review aimed to compile up-to-date information on the progress made in the protective role of swertiamarin and its metabolites such as gentianine and erythrocentaurin in diabetes mellitus and related complications to provide a guide for future research on this bioactive molecule. Information on the swertiamarin was collected from major scientific databases (Pubmed, Springer, Google Scholar and Web of Science) for publication in1974-2020. In this review, the role of swertiamarin and its metabolites in the management of diabetes mellitus and related complications was discussed. Swertiamarin and its metabolites reported exhibiting a wide range of biological activities such as antidiabetic, anti-atherosclerotic, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant effects. These activities were mainly due to their effect on various signalling pathways associated with swertiamarin such as PPAR-gene upregulation, P-407-induction, inhibition of HMG-Co A reductase, LDL oxidation, lipid peroxidation markers and stimulation of antioxidant enzymes. Swertiamarin and its metabolites exhibit a wide range of biological activities. This review presents evidence supporting the point of view that swertiamarin should be considered a potential therapeutic agent for the management of diabetes mellitus and related complications, giving rise to novel applications in their prevention and treatment

Consistency in scalable systems

[EN] While eventual consistency is the general consistency guarantee ensured in cloud environments, stronger guarantees are in fact achievable. We show how scalable and highly available systems can provide processor, causal, sequential and session consistency during normal functioning. Failures and network partitions negatively affect consistency and generate divergence. After the failure or the partition, reconciliation techniques allow the system to restore consistency.This work has been supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under research grants TIN2009-14460-C03-01 and TIN2010-17193.Ruiz Fuertes, MI.; Pallardó Lozoya, MR.; Muñoz-Escoí, FD. (2012). Consistency in scalable systems. En On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2012. Springer Verlag (Germany). 7566:549-565. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33615-7_7S5495657566Ahamad, M., Bazzi, R.A., John, R., Kohli, P., Neiger, G.: The power of processor consistency. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 1993, pp. 251–260. ACM, New York (1993), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/165231.165264Alvarez, A., Arévalo, S., Cholvi, V., Fernández, A., Jiménez, E.: On the Interconnection of Message Passing Systems. Inf. Process. Lett. 105(6), 249–254 (2008)Amazon Web Services LLC: Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Website (March 2011), http://aws.amazon.com/s3/Baker, J., Bond, C., Corbett, J.C., Furman, J.J., Khorlin, A., Larson, J., Léon, J., Li, Y., Lloyd, A., Yushprakh, V.: Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for interactive services. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 223–234 (January 2011)Baldoni, R., Beraldi, R., Friedman, R., van Renesse, R.: The Hierarchical Daisy Architecture for Causal Delivery. Distributed Systems Engineering 6(2), 71–81 (1999)Bernstein, P.A., Hadzilacos, V., Goodman, N.: Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems. Addison-Wesley (1987)Bernstein, P.A., Reid, C.W., Das, S.: Hyder - A Transactional Record Manager for Shared Flash. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 9–20 (January 2011)Bershad, B.N., Zekauskas, M.J., Sawdon, W.A.: The Midway Distributed Shared Memory System. In: Proc. IEEE CompCon Conf. (1993)Brewer, E.A.: Towards Robust Distributed Systems (Abstract). In: Proc. ACM Symp. Princ. Distrib. Comput., p. 7 (2000)Budhiraja, N., Marzullo, K., Schneider, F.B., Toueg, S.: The Primary-Backup Approach. In: Mullender, S.J. (ed.) Distributed Systems, 2nd edn., ch. 8, pp. 199–216. Addison-Wesley, ACM Press (1993)Campbell, D.G., Kakivaya, G., Ellis, N.: Extreme Scale with Full SQL Language Support in Microsoft SQL Azure. In: Intnl. Conf. on Mngmnt. of Data (SIGMOD), pp. 1021–1024. ACM, New York (2010), http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1807167.1807280Cholvi, V., Jiménez, E., Anta, A.F.: Interconnection of distributed memory models. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 69(3), 295–306 (2009)Cooper, B.F., Ramakrishnan, R., Srivastava, U., Silberstein, A., Bohannon, P., Jacobsen, H., Puz, N., Weaver, D., Yerneni, R.: PNUTS: Yahoo!’s hosted data serving platform. PVLDB 1(2), 1277–1288 (2008)Daudjee, K., Salem, K.: Lazy Database Replication with Ordering Guarantees. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Data Eng., pp. 424–435. IEEE-CS (2004)Daudjee, K., Salem, K.: Lazy Database Replication with Snapshot Isolation. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Very Large Data Bases, pp. 715–726. ACM (2006)DeCandia, G., Hastorun, D., Jampani, M., Kakulapati, G., Lakshman, A., Pilchin, A., Sivasubramanian, S., Vosshall, P., Vogels, W.: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store. In: ACM Symp. Oper. Syst. Princ., pp. 205–220 (2007)Fernández, A., Jiménez, E., Cholvi, V.: On the interconnection of causal memory systems. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 64(4), 498–506 (2004)Gilbert, S., Lynch, N.A.: Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services. ACM SIGACT News 33(2), 51–59 (2002)Goodman, J.R.: Cache Consistency and Sequential Consistency. Tech. Rep. 61, SCI Committee (March 1989)Gray, J., Helland, P., O’Neil, P.E., Shasha, D.: The Dangers of Replication and a Solution. In: Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. Manage. Data, pp. 173–182. ACM (1996)Helland, P., Campbell, D.: Building on Quicksand. In: Proc. Bienn. Conf. Innov. Data Syst. Research (2009), www.crdrdb.orgHutto, P., Ahamad, M.: Slow Memory: Weakening Consistency to Enhance Concurrency in Distributed Shared Memories. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 302–311 (May 1990)Johnson, S., Jahanian, F., Shah, J.: The Inter-group Router Approach to Scalable Group Composition. In: ICDCS, pp. 4–14 (1999)Kraska, T., Hentschel, M., Alonso, G., Kossmann, D.: Consistency Rationing in the Cloud: Pay only when it matters. PVLDB 2(1), 253–264 (2009)Lamport, L.: How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer that Correctly Executes multiprocess programs. IEEE Trans. Computers 28(9), 690–691 (1979)Lipton, R.J., Sandberg, J.S.: Pram: A Scalable Shared Memory. Tech. Rep. CS-TR-180-88, Princeton University, Department of Computer Science (September 1988)Mosberger, D.: Memory Consistency Models. Operating Systems Review 27(1), 18–26 (1993)Ruiz-Fuertes, M.I., Muñoz-Escoí, F.D.: Refinement of the One-Copy Serializable Correctness Criterion. Tech. Rep. ITI-SIDI-2011/004, Instituto Tecnológico de Informática, Valencia, Spain (November 2011)Stonebraker, M., Madden, S., Abadi, D.J., Harizopoulos, S., Hachem, N., Helland, P.: The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite). In: 33rd Intnl. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), pp. 1150–1160. ACM Press, Vienna (2007)Terry, D.B., Demers, A.J., Petersen, K., Spreitzer, M., Theimer, M., Welch, B.B.: Session Guarantees for Weakly Consistent Replicated Data. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Parallel Distrib. Inform. Syst., pp. 140–149. IEEE-CS (1994)Vogels, W.: Eventually Consistent. Communications of the ACM (CACM) 52(1), 40–44 (2009)VoltDB, Inc.: VoltDB technical overview: A high performance, scalable RDBMS for Big Data, high velocity OLTP and realtime analytics. Website (April 2012), http://voltdb.com/sites/default/files/PDFs/VoltDBTechnicalOverview_April_2012.pdfWiesmann, M., Schiper, A.: Comparison of Database Replication Techniques Based on Total Order Broadcast. IEEE T. Knowl. Data En. 17(4), 551–566 (2005

Impact of ethynylene linkers on the optical and electrochemical properties of benzothiadiazole based alternate conjugated polymers

The effect of ethynylene spacers on the bandgap of alternating polymers, comprising 4,7-linked benzothiadiazole units and 2,7-linked fluorene, 2,7-linked carbazole or 2,6-linked anthracene repeat units has been investigated. The three novel polymers PFDEBT, PCDEBT and PPADEBT were prepared via the Sonogashira coupling reaction. The optical, electrochemical and thermal properties of the resulting polymers were compared and analysed. All polymers displayed low solubility in common organic solvents and have moderate molecular weights. Optical studies revealed that all the new ethynylene based-polymers displayed large bandgaps in excess of 2.1 eV. Results highlighted that incorporation of acetylene units between the benzothiadiazole electron accepting units and the other electron donor units over polymer chains leads to wide bandgaps as a result of the electron accepting properties of the acetylene units. The HOMO levels of the resulting polymers are unaffected by the different donor moieties used. However, varying the electron donor units can perturb the electron accepting ability of the main chain of polymers in this series and their LUMO levels. Anthracene-based polymer (PPADEBT) displayed the lowest LUMO level, while the fluorene-based polymer (PFDEBT) displayed the highest LUMO level. All polymers showed good stability to thermal degradation. The amorphous nature of these polymers was confirmed with powder X-ray diffraction studies

Predominant mechanisms for the removal of nickel metal ion from aqueous solution using cement kiln dust

The experimental methodology achieved in the present study signified that the adsorption and precipitation were mainly mechanisms occurred together in the removal of nickel from aqueous solutions by sorption using cement kiln dust (CKD) byproduct as sorbent. Finding the contribution of each mechanism in the removal process and derivation an analytical model for finding the portion of precipitation were the focal points of this work. Results proved that the pure precipitation was increased with the increase of CKD dosage and metal concentration where total removal (adsorption-precipitation) ranged from 45 to 100%. The SEM micrographs of the CKD sorbent before and after sorption process certified that there was a crystal precipitates on the surface of the CKD. Also, these graphs in combination with FT-IR tests proved that [Ni(OH2)n]+2 (n=4-6) species were bonded with CKD and insoluble hydroxide species may be precipitated onto the CaO surfaces by co-precipitation, while K-O, Si-O and Ca-O groups enhanced the adsorption mechanism