Isolation of Lactobacillus salivarius from Children and Purification of Bacteriocin to Inhibition Cancer Cell in Vitro

Bacteria being used to make anticancer agents could provide an extra source of lead compounds for the pharmaceutical industry.  Bacterium Lactobacillus salivarius produce compounds that selectively inhibit growth of human cancer cells Lactobacillus salivarius naturally produces a compound called Bacteriocins.  Bacteriocins are bacterial proteins produced to prevent the growth of competing microorganisms in a particular biological niche and we can use it as antineoplastic. The aim of this study was to isolate bacteriocin produced by lactic acid bacteria. A preparation of bacteriocin from a strain Lactobacillus salivarius has long been shown to have antineoplastic activity against a variety of human tumor and animal tumor cell lines in vitro. A total of 60 LAB  were isolated from children stool 45 isolate showed a clear antimicrobial activity against indicator strain Streptococcus aureus and by used sodium phosphate buffer (pH8) from an 80% ammonium sulfate precipitate. The inhibition  activity was determent by well diffusion assay method technique, Bacteriocin purification processes were carried out by using ion-exchange (Trisacryl SP) and gel filtration chromatography (Sephacryl – S300). The apparent molecular mass of partially purified bacteriocin was 15. 848 kDa,  Cell Culture was maintained in RPMI 1640 medium supplemented with 10% (vol/vol) fetal calf serum,  Cytotoxicity of bacteriocin was assessed on human cell line (RD) and animal cell line (MDCK) cell viability after incubation for 48 h in medium containing 500AU/ml (1.15 mg/ml). Both cell types used in this study were sensitive to bacteriocin and the bacteriocin appeared to inhibit proliferation of tumor cell line. The animal cell line was more sensitivity than human cell line

COUNTABLY Z-COMPACT SPACES

Abstract. In this work we study countably z-compact spaces and z-Lindelof spaces. Several new properties of them are given. It is proved that every countably z-compact space is pseuodocompact (a space on which every real valued continuous function is bounded). Spaces which are countably z-compact but not countably compact are given. It is proved that a space is countably z-compact iff every countable z-closed set is compact. Characterizations of countably z-compact and z-Lindelof spaces by multifunctions are given

Alternatives Strategies to Empower Youth Volunteering in Omani Society Using SWOTAnalysis Technique

The study aimed to develop strategic alternatives to activate volunteer work among Omani youth. SWOT analysis was used to indicate the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges faced by youth. A questionnaire of 32 items with two domains was developed. An estimation of reliability using Cronbach-Alpha indicated 0.887 for level of effectiveness, and 0.918 for level of existences. A sample of 89 experts from civil society organizations and higher education institutions from different Omani governorates was selected. The results revealed that the most powerful aspects of volunteering were the incentives to encourage youth, notably the Sultan Qaboos Award for Volunteerings at the national level, and the existence of many charities, including those related to women associations, and others that provide voluntarily services to special needs people. The overall average weight of the strengths and weaknesses was 194.44 and 186.46 respectively. The main opportunities were reflected by existing governmental departments to follow up the work of the voluntary institutions, and the NGO civil societies’ global awareness of volunteering. Further, the study results showed that average percentage means of opportunities and challenges were 145.04 and 143.79 respectively. Considering these results, four strategic alternatives were developed

The effect of Aqueous Olive Leaves Extract on the Pancreatic Islets of Streptozotocin Induced Diabetes Mellitus in mice

The objectives of this study were to investigate the effects of the aqueous crude extract of Olea europaea on serum glucose level and histopathological changes in islets of Langerhans in an induced-diabetic mellitus in mice. The experimental recommended 60 male mice were divided into three groups contained 20 mice each. The fi rst group was the control and they were given normal saline pH 7.0. The second group was intraperitoneally injected by a dose of 100mg/Kg of STZ and 10% glucose instead of normal drinking water over the 24 hours followed the treatment. The third group was injected intraperitoneally with 100mg/kg STZ and orally given 0.33g/ Kg aqueous extract of olive leaves everyday for four weeks. Blood specimens were collected, and the serum separated and stored at 4OC until it is used. The animals were dissected and the pancreatic tissues were obtained, the tissue specimens were fi xed in the Boun’s solution for 24 hr, and processed for histological studies. There was a signifi cant increase in blood glucose level of the STZ- diabetic mice by the fi rst week of injection with STZ in comparison with control group. A signifi cant decrease in blood glucose level occurred in the STZ-diabetic group treated with Olea europaea aqueous extract. Islets of langerhans are hypertrophied in the STZ-diabetic group and this hypertrophy showed a signifi cant increased in the average of islets size at the last week, while the treatment with Olea europaea aqueous extract showed a reduction of the islet size compared with the islets of the STZ –diabetic Mic

Comprehensive Evaluations of Student Performance Estimation via Machine Learning

Success in student learning is the primary aim of the educational system. Artificial intelligence utilizes data and machine learning to achieve excellence in student learning. In this paper, we exploit several machine learning techniques to estimate early student performance. Two main simulations are used for the evaluation. The first simulation used the Traditional Machine Learning Classifiers (TMLCs) applied to the House dataset, and they are Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA). The best results were achieved with the MLP classifier with a division of 80% training and 20% testing, with an accuracy of 88.89%. The fusion of these seven classifiers was also applied and the highest result was equal to the MLP. Moreover, in the second simulation, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was utilized and evaluated on five main datasets, namely, House, Western Ontario University (WOU), Experience Application Programming Interface (XAPI), University of California-Irvine (UCI), and Analytics Vidhya (AV). The UCI dataset was subdivided into three datasets, namely, UCI-Math, UCI-Por, and UCI-Fused. Moreover, the AV dataset has three targets which are Math, Reading, and Writing. The best accuracy results were achieved at 97.5%, 99.55%, 98.57%, 99.28%, 99.40%, 99.67%, 92.93%, 96.99%, and 96.84% for the House, WOU, XAPI, UCI-Math, UCI-Por, UCI-Fused, AV-Math, AV-Reading, and AV-Writing datasets, respectively, under the same protocol of evaluation. The system demonstrates that the proposed CNN-based method surpasses all seven conventional methods and other state-of-the-art-work

The methodological quality of systematic reviews comparing temporomandibular joint disorder surgical and non-surgical treatment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Temporomandibular joint disorders (TMJD) are multifactor, complex clinical problems affecting approximately 60–70% of the general population, with considerable controversy about the most effective treatment. For example, reports claim success rates of 70% and 83% for non-surgical and surgical treatment, whereas other reports claim success rates of 40% to 70% for self-improvement without treatment. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to (1) identify systematic reviews comparing temporomandibular joint disorder surgical and non-surgical treatment, (2) evaluate their methodological quality, and (3) evaluate the evidence grade within the systematic reviews.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A search strategy was developed and implemented for MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, LILACS, and Brazilian Dentistry Bibliography databases. Inclusion criteria were: systematic reviews (± meta-analysis) comparing surgical and non-surgical TMJD treatment, published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or German between the years 1966 and 2007(up to July). Exclusion criteria were: <it>in vitro </it>or animal studies; narrative reviews or editorials or editorial letters; and articles published in other languages. Two investigators independently selected and evaluated systematic reviews. Three different instruments (AMSTAR, OQAQ and CASP) were used to evaluate methodological quality, and the results averaged. The GRADE instrument was used to evaluate the evidence grade within the reviews.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The search strategy identified 211 reports; of which 2 were systematic reviews meeting inclusion criteria. The first review met 23.5 ± 6.0% and the second met 77.5 ± 12.8% of the methodological quality criteria (mean ± sd). In these systematic reviews between 9 and 15% of the trials were graded as high quality, and 2 and 8% of the total number of patients were involved in these studies.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results indicate that in spite of the widespread impact of TMJD, and the multitude of potential interventions, clinicians have expended sparse attention to systematically implementing clinical trial methodology that would improve validity and reliability of outcome measures. With some 20 years of knowledge of evidence-based healthcare, the meager attention to these issues begins to raise ethical issues about TMJD trial conduct and clinical care.</p

Improving a gold standard: treating human relevance judgments of MEDLINE document pairs

Given prior human judgments of the condition of an object it is possible to use these judgments to make a maximal likelihood estimate of what future human judgments of the condition of that object will be. However, if one has a reasonably large collection of similar objects and the prior human judgments of a number of judges regarding the condition of each object in the collection, then it is possible to make predictions of future human judgments for the whole collection that are superior to the simple maximal likelihood estimate for each object in isolation. This is possible because the multiple judgments over the collection allow an analysis to determine the relative value of a judge as compared with the other judges in the group and this value can be used to augment or diminish a particular judge’s influence in predicting future judgments. Here we study and compare five different methods for making such improved predictions and show that each is superior to simple maximal likelihood estimates

Loss of Akt activity increases circulating soluble endoglin release in preeclampsia:identification of inter-dependency between Akt-1 and heme oxygenase-1

Aims - Endothelial dysfunction is a hallmark of preeclampsia. Desensitization of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt pathway underlies endothelial dysfunction and haeme oxygenase-1 (HO-1) is decreased in preeclampsia. To identify therapeutic targets, we sought to assess whether these two regulators act to suppress soluble endoglin (sEng), an antagonist of transforming growth factor-ß (TGF-ß) signalling, which is known to be elevated in preeclampsia. Methods and results - Vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A), fibroblast growth factor (FGF-2), angiopoietin-1 (Ang-1), and insulin, which all activate the PI3K/Akt pathway, inhibited the release of sEng from endothelial cells. Inhibition of the PI3K/Akt pathway, by overexpression of phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) or a dominant-negative isoform of Akt (Aktdn) induced sEng release from endothelial cells and prevented the inhibitory effect of VEGF-A. Conversely, overexpression of a constitutively active Akt (Aktmyr) inhibited PTEN and cytokine-induced sEng release. Systemic delivery of Aktmyr to mice significantly reduced circulating sEng, whereas Aktdn promoted sEng release. Phosphorylation of Akt was reduced in preeclamptic placenta and this correlated with the elevated level of circulating sEng. Knock-down of Akt using siRNA prevented HO-1-mediated inhibition of sEng release and reduced HO-1 expression. Furthermore, HO-1 null mice have reduced phosphorylated Akt in their organs and overexpression of Aktmyr failed to suppress the elevated levels of sEng detected in HO-1 null mice, indicating that HO-1 is required for the Akt-mediated inhibition of sEng. Conclusion - The loss of PI3K/Akt and/or HO-1 activity promotes sEng release and positive manipulation of these pathways offers a strategy to circumvent endothelial dysfunction

The N-Terminal Domain and Glycosomal Localization of Leishmania Initial Acyltransferase LmDAT Are Important for Lipophosphoglycan Synthesis

Ether glycerolipids of Leishmania major are important membrane components as well as building blocks of various virulence factors. In L. major, the first enzyme of the ether glycerolipid biosynthetic pathway, LmDAT, is an unusual, glycosomal dihydroxyacetonephosphate acyltransferase important for parasite's growth and survival during the stationary phase, synthesis of ether lipids, and virulence. The present work extends our knowledge of this important biosynthetic enzyme in parasite biology. Site-directed mutagenesis of LmDAT demonstrated that an active enzyme was critical for normal growth and survival during the stationary phase. Deletion analyses showed that the large N-terminal extension of this initial acyltransferase may be important for its stability or activity. Further, abrogation of the C-terminal glycosomal targeting signal sequence of LmDAT led to extraglycosomal localization, did not impair its enzymatic activity but affected synthesis of the ether glycerolipid-based virulence factor lipophosphoglycan. In addition, expression of this recombinant form of LmDAT in a null mutant of LmDAT did not restore normal growth and survival during the stationary phase. These results emphasize the importance of this enzyme's compartmentalization in the glycosome for the generation of lipophosphoglycan and parasite's biology

SPARC 2018 Internationalisation and collaboration : Salford postgraduate annual research conference book of abstracts

Welcome to the Book of Abstracts for the 2018 SPARC conference. This year we not only celebrate the work of our PGRs but also the launch of our Doctoral School, which makes this year’s conference extra special. Once again we have received a tremendous contribution from our postgraduate research community; with over 100 presenters, the conference truly showcases a vibrant PGR community at Salford. These abstracts provide a taster of the research strengths of their works, and provide delegates with a reference point for networking and initiating critical debate. With such wide-ranging topics being showcased, we encourage you to take up this great opportunity to engage with researchers working in different subject areas from your own. To meet global challenges, high impact research inevitably requires interdisciplinary collaboration. This is recognised by all major research funders. Therefore engaging with the work of others and forging collaborations across subject areas is an essential skill for the next generation of researchers