Application of the mixture design to decolourise effluent textile wastewater using continuous stirred bed reactor

Important pollutants in textile effluents are mainly recalcitrant organics, colours, toxicants and inhibitory compounds, surfactants, chlorinated compounds (AOX), pH and salts. An aerobic system using a continuous stirred bed reactor (SBR) was continuously operated at constant temperature and fed with textile wastewater (pH 7 and total chemical oxygen demand (COD) 1 700 mg/ℓ).This report is focused on the decolourisation treatment of effluent by a bacterial consortium (Sphingomonas paucimobilis, Bacillus sp. and filamentous bacteria). The influence of the different mixtures of 3 strains on the decolourisation of effluent (cell density fixed at OD600 = 1) was studied using an equilateral triangle diagram and mixture experimental design to assess colour and COD removal during species evolution. With the aid of analysis software (Minitab 14.0), the formulation of pure culture was optimised for several responses and the best formulation obtained. The results suggested that the highest predictable specific decolourisation rate and chemical oxygen demand (COD) were 86.72% and 75.06%, respectively. Regression coefficients between the variables and the responses of decolourisation and COD removal were, respectively, R2 = 72.48% and 54.28%, which indicated excellent evaluation of experimental data by the polynomial regression model. UV-visible analysis confirmed biodegradation of effluent.Keywords: textile wastewater, bacterial decolourisation, response surface, mixture design, SB

Effectiveness of an Educational Program on University Collegians’ Perceptions of Healthy Exercise pattern

To find out the effectiveness of an educational program on university students' perceptions of a healthy exercise pattern. A quasi-experimental study to find out the exercise pattern of Mosul University students for the period from 9th November 2022 to 2nd January 2023, the sample of (60) students. The questionnaire consists of two parts: a part that measures social and demographic information and includes (6) items, and a part that measures healthy lifestyle data with regard to exercise pattern and includes (10) items. Determine the validity of the content of the questionnaire by presenting it to experts and using the half-division technique and calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient to determine the validity. The results of the data showed that all (60) students in the study sample did not have an adequate level of perception of the healthy physical activity pattern in the pre-test, while the results of the post-test after implementing the program were high, which shows that there is an improvement in their perceptions of the healthy physical activity pattern.The study showed that there was an improvement in perceptions of a healthy lifestyle related to exercise pattern in the study group compared to those in the control group.The study recommended the need to develop educational programs, lectures, courses and seminars on the benefits of a healthy exercise pattern that university students must follow to increase their perceptions that lead to changing their lifestyle and getting rid of wrong behaviors and habits

Chemokine and Chemokine Receptor Gene Polymorphism in Tunisian Hemodialysis Patients with HCV Infection

Introduction: Our aim was to investigate the possibility of a significant relationship between chemokines and chemokine receptor genes polymorphisms and the spontaneous clearance or the persistence of HCV infection. Methods: A total of 96 hemodialysis (HD) patients infected with HCV were classified into two groups: G1 included 73 patients with persistently positive HCV-RNA and G2 included 23 HD patients who have spontaneously eliminated the virus. The control group consisted of 170 healthy blood donors. All subjects were genotyped for CCR5 Δ32, CCR5 (-59029) A/G, CCR2 (64Ile) and MCP-1(-2518) A/G gene polymorphisms. Results: Our results showed statistically significant increased frequencies of the CCR2 (64Ile) and the (-59029) CCR5 A alleles in patients infected with HCV (22.1% and 35.9%) compared to G1 (24.3% and 40.6%) and compared to controls (14.4% and 20%). We also observed a lower frequency of the MCP-1 G allele and a greater frequency of the CCR5Δ32 variant in G2 (15.2% and 6.5%) compared to G1 (22.6% and 1.4%) that was not statistically significant. However, adjustment for known covariates (age, gender and HCV genotypes) didn’t confirm the results of univariate analysis. Conclusion: In conclusion, our study suggests a possible role for some of the studied chemokines polymorphisms in the spontaneous clearance or persistence of HCV infection in Tunisian population. These results should be further investigated by a prospective cohort studies and large population-based studies.Keywords: Chemokines; Receptors; Hepatitis C virus; Spontaneous Clearance; Polymorphisms

Genetic variation of durum wheat landraces using morphological and protein markers

Genetic variations of cultivars are very interesting in reducing genetic vulnerability and lead to stable control of production. The aim of this research was to study genetic diversity among six durum wheat cultivars. For the first assay we evaluated seven morphological traits which are: spikelet per spike, spike length, spike width, beard length, plant height, width of truncation and barb length. The tested genotypes were classified in three groups according to the linkage distance analysis. The genetic variability was also evaluated for seed storage-proteins by sodium dodecylsulphate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). Electrophoregram allowed the estimation of the durum wheat genetic similarity (GS). This GS analysis based on Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic averages (UPGMA), permits to obtain the same genotypic clustering. No significant correlation was observed among the two methods tested. It is concluded that seed storage protein profiles could be useful markers in the studies of genetic diversity and genotypes classification, which can be used to improve the efficiency of wheat breeding programs.Key words: Wheat genotypes, SDS-PAGE, genetic diversity, cluster analysis

Representation Learning for Chemical Activity Predictions

Computational prediction of a phenotypic response upon the chemical perturbation on a biological system plays an important role in drug discovery and many other applications. Chemical fingerprints derived from chemical structures are a widely used feature to build machine learning models. However, the fingerprints ignore the biological context, thus, they suffer from several problems such as the activity cliff and curse of dimensionality. Fundamentally, the chemical modulation of biological activities is a multi-scale process. It is the genome-wide chemical-target interactions that modulate chemical phenotypic responses. Thus, the genome-scale chemical-target interaction profile will more directly correlate with in vitro and in vivo activities than the chemical structure. Nevertheless, the scope of direct application of the chemical-target interaction profile is limited due to the severe incompleteness, bias, and noisiness of bioassay data. To address the aforementioned problems, we developed two new chemical and protein representation methods in this thesis. The first one is a Latent Target Interaction Profile (LTIP). LTIP embeds chemicals into a low dimensional continuous latent space that represents genome-scale chemical-target interactions. Subsequently, LTIP can be used as a feature to build machine learning models. Using the drug sensitivity of cancer cell lines as a benchmark, we have shown that the LTIP robustly outperforms chemical fingerprints regardless of machine learning algorithms. Moreover, the LTIP is complementary to the chemical fingerprints. We can combine LTIP with other fingerprints to further improve the performance of bioactivity prediction. We also developed a new protein sequence embedding method Distilled Sequence Alignment Embedding (DISAE) to represent proteins. We compared CGKronRLS to other machine learning algorithms including Random Forest and XGBoost for predicting drug-target interactions. We show how the resultant protein deep representations can be used to predict novel drug-protein pairs interactions which can improve drug safety and open many avenues for drug repurposing. Our results demonstrate the potential of LTIP in particular and multi-scale modeling in general in predictive modeling of chemical modulation of biological activities. It also shows the predictive power of DISAE which can further be improved through deep learning models

Effects of Feeding Periods of High Cholesterol and Saturated Fat Diet on Blood Biochemistry and Hydroxyproline Fractions in Rabbits

Hypercholesterolemia and hypertriglyceridemia are considered as important risk factors during the atherosclerotic process. The aim of the present investigation was to study the total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDLC), high density lipoprotein (HDL), triglyceride (TG), platelet levels and hydroxyproline fractions during the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. For this purpose, twenty five 12-weeks, New Zealand white male rabbits, were purchased, individually caged, and divided into either control group or cholesterol-fed group. The control group (n = 10) was fed 100 g/day of normal diet, ORC-4 (Oriental Yeast Co. Ltd., Tokyo, Japan) for a period of 15 weeks. The cholesterol-fed group (n = 15) was fed a high cholesterol and saturated fat diet of ORC-4 containing 1% cholesterol plus 1% olive oil (100 g/day) for periods of 5 (group 1), 10 (group 2) and 15 (group 3) weeks. Blood sample from each animal was taken at the end of the experimental period for the biochemical analysis. The results of the present study showed that TC, LDLC, TG, HDLC and platelets were significantly (P < 0.01) increased in cholesterol-fed rabbits as compared with control rabbits. The serum hydroxyproline (Hyp) in rabbits belonging to group 1 showed no significant alteration when compared to control group. Group 2 rabbits showed a significant increase of 103% (P < 0.01) and 100% (P < 0.001) in free and protein—bound hydroxyproline fractions respectively when compared to control rabbits. However, there was no significant change in peptide—bound and total serum hydroxyproline levels as compared to the control group (P > 0.05). There was no significant (P > 0.05) decrease of free serum hydroxyproline in group 3 rabbits when compared to control rabbits. On the other hand, group 3 rabbits showed a significant increase in peptide–bound and protein-bound Hyp by 517% (P < 0.05) and 100% (P < 0.01) respectively when compared to control rabbits. However, total serum Hyp in group 3 rabbits showed no significant (P > 0.05) change when compared to control rabbits. These results suggest that feeding rabbits high cholesterol and saturated fat diet for feeding periods of 5, 10 and 15 weeks induced significant change in TC, LDLC, HDL, TG, platelet levels and various Hyp fractions in serum without any significant change in the total Hyp content

The Ljapunov-Schmidt reduction for some critical problems

This is a survey about the application of the Ljapunov-Schmidt reduction for some critical problems

Lupus érythémateux systémique à début pédiatrique: à propos d’un cas

Le lupus érythémateux systémique (LES) est une maladie systémique auto-immune d'étiologie inconnue qui touche essentiellement les femmes àl'âge adulte. Le lupus pédiatrique est une entité rare. Nous rapportons une nouvelle observation. Il s'agissait d'un nourrisson âgé de 7 mois quiprésentait des lésions cutanées purpuriques, une polyarthrite fébrile. Le bilan immunologique était positif (AAN et anti-ADN). Une améliorationclinique et biologique a été notée sous corticothérapie générale avec une récidive lors de la dégression du traitement

The changes in various hydroxyproline fractions in aortic tissue of rabbits are closely related to the progression of atherosclerosis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The most important function of collagen and elastin is to induce several mechanical parameters which are known to play a dominant role in governing mechanical properties of the blood vessels. The aortic tissue of rabbit is one of the important sources of collagen and elastin. The effects of high fat diet (HFD) on the hydroxyproline (Hyp) fractions in serum and aortic tissues of rabbits and collagen content in the aortic tissues of rabbits have not been documented before. The present study was undertaken to investigate the changes in Hyp fractions in serum and aortic tissues of rabbits and collagen content in the aortic tissues of rabbits during the progression of atherosclerosis. The atherosclerotic model used in this study was the New Zealand white rabbit (male; 12 weeks old). Twenty five rabbits were individually caged, and divided into control group (NOR; n = 10) and HFD group (CHO; n = 15). The control group was fed (100 g/day) of normal (NOR) diet for a period of 15 weeks. The HFD group was fed normal diet supplemented with 1.0% cholesterol plus 1.0% olive oil (100 g/day) for the same period of time.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that the TC, LDLC, and TG (mg/dl) were significantly (p < 0.001) increased in HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits with percentage normalized changes of 1198%, 1591%, and 710%, respectively. The peptide-bound Hyp in the serum was significantly (P < 0.05) increased in HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits with percentage normalized change of 517% while it significantly (P < 0.01) decreased in aortic tissues of HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits with percentage normalized change of 65%. The protein-bound Hyp in the serum was significantly (P < 0.01) increased in HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits with percentage normalized change of 100%; the protein-bound Hyp in the aortic tissues of control rabbits was 235.30 ± 55.14 (Mean ± SD) while it was not detectable (ND) in HFD rabbits. Total serum Hyp showed no significant (P < 0.05) change in HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits while it was significantly (P < 0.05) decreased in aortic tissues of HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits with percentage normalized change of 73%. The total collagen was significantly (p < 0.01) decreased in aortic tissues of HFD rabbits compared with control rabbits with percentage normalized change of 73% which was supported by histological study.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results suggest that percentage decrease in various Hyp fractions in aortic tissue of HFD rabbits are closely related to percentage decrease of collagen content in aortic tissues of HFD rabbits. These results also suggest that it may be possible to use the changes in various Hyp fractions in aortic tissues of rabbits as an important risk factor during the progression of atherosclerosis.</p