Infinite Product Exponents for Modular Forms

Recently, D. Choi obtained a description of the coefficients of the infinite product expansions of meromorphic modular forms over $\Gamma_0(N)$. Using this result, we provide some bounds on these infinite product coefficients for holomorphic modular forms. We give an exponential upper bound for the growth of these coefficients. We show that this bound is also a lower bound in the case that the genus of the associated modular curve $X_0(N)$ is $0$ or $1$.Comment: 11 page

Implementation and evaluation of employee health and wellness program using RE-AIM framework

Purpose: To describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of an employer-sponsored health screening program [Employee Health and Wellness Program (EHWP)] in an academic healthcare system in Pakistan.Design/methodology/approach: One-year after implementation, we use the RE-AIM framework (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance) to evaluate and report participant- and organizational-level indicators of success.Findings: Of 5286 invited employees, 4523 (86%) completed blood work and 1809 (34%) completed health risk assessment (Reach). Of the 915 (51%) who required referrals, 3% were referred for new diagnoses of diabetes, hepatitis C or severe anemia; 63% for elevated 10- year risk of cardiometabolic diseases (cardiovascular disease and diabetes); and 25% for counseling for depression, obesity or smoking cessation (Effectiveness). Employees’ barriers to enrollment were explored (Adoption). While institutional costs were considered nominal (US $ 20/employee), organizational barriers were identified (Implementation). Finally, 97% of users reported interest in enrollment if EHWP was offered again (Maintenance).Originality/ value: In a country with minimal focus on adult preventive care, we report the impact of an employer-offered wellness program that identified new risk factors and offered referral for ongoing care. Employees reported a positive experience and were willing to reenroll. Using the RE-AIM framework, we have defined indicators in the real-world setting, that can be used effectively by other institutions to start such a program

scFv Antibody: Principles and Clinical Application

To date, generation of single-chain fragment variable (scFv) has become an established technique used to produce a completely functional antigen-binding fragment in bacterial systems. The advances in antibody engineering have now facilitated a more efficient and generally applicable method to produce Fv fragments. Basically, scFv antibodies produced from phage display can be genetically fused to the marker proteins, such as fluorescent proteins or alkaline phosphatase. These bifunctional proteins having both antigen-binding capacity and marker activity can be obtained from transformed bacteria and used for one-step immunodetection of biological agents. Alternatively, antibody fragments could also be applied in the construction of immunotoxins, therapeutic gene delivery, and anticancer intrabodies for therapeutic purposes. This paper provides an overview of the current studies on the principle, generation, and application of scFv. The potential of scFv in breast cancer research is also discussed in this paper

Construction of single-chain variable fragment antibodies against MCF-7 breast cancer cells.

A phage display library of single chain variable fragment (scFv) against MCF-7 breast cancer cells was constructed from C3A8 hybridoma cells. RNA from the C3A8 was isolated, cDNA was constructed, and variable heavy and light immunoglobulin chain gene region were amplified using PCR. The variable heavy and light chain gene regions were combined with flexible linker, linked to a pCANTAB 5E phagemid vector and electrophoresed into supE strain of Escherichia coli TG1 cells. Forty-eight clones demonstrated positive binding activity to MCF-7 breast cancer cell membrane fragments and the strongest of 48 clones was selected for analysis. The anti-MCF-7 library evaluated by SfiI and NotI digests demonstrated that anti-MCF-7 scFv antibodies possess individual patterns that should be able to recognize distinct human breast cancer cells. The C3A8 scFv, with an apparent molecular weight of 32 kDa, showed high homology (99%) with single chain antibody against rice stripe virus protein P20. In summary, the anti MCF-7 scFv antibody can be used for pretargeting breast cancer for clinical diagnosis of patients; it also has potential for therapeutic applications

Medicinal plants with gastroprotective potential

Peptic ulcer disease (PUD) is a main source of morbidity and mortality worldwide. It is characterized by erosions in mucosal linings of stomach and duodenum. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and Helicobacter pylori are mainly responsible for peptic ulcer disease. Histamine receptor blockers and proton pump inhibitors are most prominent therapies in the treatment of peptic ulcer. However, severe adverse effects of NSAIDs have been reported. Therefore, focus is now diverted towards herbal formulations of medicinal plants for the treatment of ulcer. Plants contain different phytoconstituents which are responsible for increasing defensive mechanisms of body against peptic ulcer. The current review focuses on the commonly used gastroprotective plants as antiulcer agents.

THE Visual Outcomes and Prognostic Factors Associated With Open-Globe Injuries among the Pakistani Population

Objective: To determine the visual outcomes and prognostic factors associated with open globe-injuries in patients attending Sindh Institute of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences (SIOVS), Hyderabad, Pakistan. Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted at Sindh Institute of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences (SIOVS), Hyderabad from January 2022 to February 2023. All patients irrespective of age and gender attended the institute with open globe injury were enrolled. Visual outcomes of open-globe injury were recorded as length of wound and lens status. Complications associated with open-globe injury were also noted. Results: Of 336 patients, the mean age of the patients was 17.6 ± 15.6 years. There were 231 (68.7%) males and 105 (31.3%) females. The most common object of injury was stick/thorn and metal/iron i.e., 117 (34.8%) and 105 (31.3%) respectively. Center of cornea/visual axis involvement was observed in 207 (61.6%) patients. The mean length of the wound was 6.28 ± 3.65 mm. Status of the lens showed an intact lens in 140 (41.7%) patients and traumatic cataract with intact/rupture of capsule in 196 (58.3%) patients. A significant association between the length of the wound and the status of the lens was found with the object of injury (p-value <0.001), and center of cornea/visual axis involvement (p-value <0.001). Conclusion: In this study, the majority of patients with globe injuries were younger. Object of injury and center of cornea/visual axis involvement were two prognostic factors that were significantly associated with visual outcomes of globe injuries

Novel centroid selection approaches for KMeans-clustering based recommender systems

Recommender systems have the ability to filter unseen information for predicting whether a particular user would prefer a given item when making a choice. Over the years, this process has been dependent on robust applications of data mining and machine learning techniques, which are known to have scalability issues when being applied for recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a k-means clustering-based recommendation algorithm, which addresses the scalability issues associated with traditional recommender systems. An issue with traditional k-means clustering algorithms is that they choose the initial k centroid randomly, which leads to inaccurate recommendations and increased cost for offline training of clusters. The work in this paper highlights how centroid selection in k-means based recommender systems can improve performance as well as being cost saving. The proposed centroid selection method has the ability to exploit underlying data correlation structures, which has been proven to exhibit superior accuracy and performance in comparison to the traditional centroid selection strategies, which choose centroids randomly. The proposed approach has been validated with an extensive set of experiments based on five different datasets (from movies, books, and music domain). These experiments prove that the proposed approach provides a better quality cluster and converges quicker than existing approaches, which in turn improves accuracy of the recommendation provided

2,2′-(Biphenyl-2,2′-diyldi­oxy)diaceto­hydrazide

In the mol­ecule of the title compound, C16H18N4O4, the dihedral angle between the mean planes of the two benzene rings is 56.76 (5)°. The crystal structure reveals extensive inter­molecular hydrogen bonds between carbonyl O atoms and primary amines, as well as between primary and secondary amines of hydrazide, forming rings of R 2 2(10) and R 2 2(6) motifs, respectively. The structure is further stabilized by intra­molecular and non-classical hydrogen bonds of the types N—H⋯O and C—H⋯O, respectively. The structure does not show any π–π inter­actions

Communication--Computation Trade-offs in PIR

We study the computation and communication costs and their possible trade-offs in various constructions for private information retrieval (PIR), including schemes based on homomorphic encryption and the Gentry--Ramzan PIR (ICALP\u2705). We improve over the construction of SealPIR (S&P\u2718) using compression techniques and a new oblivious expansion, which reduce the communication bandwidth by 60% while preserving essentially the same computation cost. We then present MulPIR, a PIR protocol leveraging multiplicative homomorphism to implement the recursion steps in PIR. This eliminates the exponential dependence of PIR communication on the recursion depth due to the ciphertext expansion, at the cost of an increased computational cost for the server. Additionally, MulPIR outputs a regular homomorphic encryption ciphertext, which can be homomorphically post-processed. As a side result, we describe how to do conjunctive and disjunctive PIR queries. On the other end of the communication--computation spectrum, we take a closer look at Gentry--Ramzan PIR, a scheme with asymptotically optimal communication rate. Here, the bottleneck is the server\u27s computation, which we manage to reduce significantly. Our optimizations enable a tunable trade-off between communication and computation, which allows us to reduce server computation by as much as 85%, at the cost of an increased query size. We further show how to efficiently construct PIR for sparse databases. Our constructions support batched queries, as well as symmetric PIR. We implement all of our PIR constructions, and compare their communication and computation overheads with respect to each other for several application scenarios

Human monkeypox: history, presentations, transmission, epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention

Human monkeypox is a zoonotic infection that is similar to the diseases caused by other poxviruses. It is endemic among wild rodents in the rainforests of Central and Western Africa, and can be transmitted via direct skin contact or mucosal exposure to infected animals. The initial symptoms include fever, headache, myalgia, fatigue, and lymphadenopathy, the last of which is the main symptom that distinguishes it from smallpox. In order to prevent and manage the disease, those who are infected must be rapidly diagnosed and isolated. Several vaccines have already been developed (e.g., JYNNEOS, ACAM2000 and ACAM3000) and antiviral drugs (e.g., cidofovir and tecovirimat) can also be used to treat the disease. In the present study, we reviewed the history, morphology, clinical presentations, transmission routes, diagnosis, prevention, and potential treatment strategies for monkeypox, in order to enable health authorities and physicians to better deal with this emerging crisis