Prostate cancer and glutathione S-transferase deletions

GSTM1 and GSTT1 gene polymorphisms have been studied in many populations to evaluate their association with prostate cancer risk with contrasting results. The current study was aimed to find out the association of GSTM1 and GSTT1 gene polymorphisms with prostate cancer in Pakistani men. This case control study included pathologically confirmed prostate cancer patients and age matched male controls. Epidemiological data was collected by a standard questionnaire and presence or absence of GSTM1 and GSTT1 gene was observed by multiplex PCR using CYP1A1 as housekeeping gene. Prostate cancer was more prevalent in age of >60 years and most of the patients were at stage IV (70 %) and have undergone surgery. Family history of cancer, smoking, metastasis and surgery were found to be significant (P0.05) with prostate cancer risk. No significant association was found when comparing GSTM1 (OR=0.78) and GSTT1 (OR=0.89) gene deletions with prostate cancer risk. Smoking and TNM staging were also not associated with deletion of GSTM1 and GSTT1 genes. Comparison of dual null deletion of both genes with prostate cancer also showed nonsignificant associations. Deletion of GSTM1 gene at stage IV prostate cancer patients was significantly higher compared with other stages of cancer while no significance was shown by GSTT1 gene deletion. GSTM1, GSTT1 and deletion of both GSTM1 and GSTT1 genes do not contribute towards increased risk of prostate cancer in Pakistani population

A meta-analysis and experimental data for multidrug resistance genes in breast cancer

Background: Increasing trend of breast cancer incidence worldwide is a known fact. This curable disease may become fatal if drug resistance is developed leading to metastatic cancerous tissue. Objective: This is a two parts study; a meta-analysis exploring association of drug resistance (mdr1 and ABCG2) genes with breast cancer and mutational association with molecular subtypes of cancer. Methods: PCR-SSCP for genomic polymorphisms and RT-PCR for expression analysis were performed. Results: C3435T polymorphism of mdr1 gene was most commonly studied mutation with contradictory results. Association of ABCG2 gene mutations with untreated breast cancer was reported only by one study so far. Regarding current genomic analysis of mdr1 gene, three novel mutations were found in exon 12 and 2 mutations were found in exon 26. In ABCG2 gene, addition of C and T were found in intron 8 at the intron-exon junction. A positive correlation was observed between these mutations and tumor grade. Levels of mRNA expression revealed that they were over expressed in cancerous tissues compared with controls. Conclusion: These findings suggest that these genes are associated with breast cancer. Keywords: Expression; mutations; mdr1; ABCG2; breast cancer

Enhancement of critical thinking in curriculum design and delivery: A randomized controlled trial for educators

Critical thinking is an important outcome criterion of higher education in any discipline including nursing. If nursing programs envisaged preparing graduates who are equipped with critical thinking, then the educators who plan and deliver the programs must exhibit higher level thinking in their teaching practices. This paper presents finding of the 1st phase of a National level research study that aims to assess, develop and enhance educators’ critical thinking capacity

Development of students\u27 critical thinking: The educators\u27 ability to use questioning skills in the baccalaureate programmes in nursing in Pakistan

Objective: To enhance the Critical Thinking skills of educators associated with the nursing baccalaureate programmes in Pakistan. By focusing on the type and level of questions asked by the educators.Methods: Ninety-one faculty members from 14 out of 17 schools participated in the study. Data on the faculty\u27s questioning skills was obtained through classroom observations and field notes. The duration of the observations was 45-60 minutes. Using Bloom\u27s Taxonomy for cognitive thinking, questions were categorised into high and low categories.Results: Most of the questions (68.9 %) asked by the participants were of lower levels, while some (5.37 %) were ambiguous. In many instances, the participants did not allow a sufficient wait-time for students to think and respond.Conclusion: The findings suggest that educators must learn to use the questioning strategy effectively. They should ask higher level questions if they wish to inculcate Critical Thinking in students

Antibacterial evaluation of three widespread weeds Mazus japonicus, Fumaria indica and Vicia faba from Pakistan

Present study was carried out to explore the antibacterial potential of three weeds Mazus japonicus, Fumaria indica and Vicia sativa grown widely in Pakistan. Different extracts (aqueous, methanolic and petroleum ether) of the respective weeds were prepared and tested against nine bacterial strains using agar well diffusion assay. Bacterial strains included both gram positive (Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus anthracis, Bacillus megaterium, Enterococcus faecium, Enterrococcus faecalis and Enteroccocus sp) and gram negative (Pseudomonas putida, Escherichia coli and Escherichia coli top10) bacteria. Ten different concentrations of each extracts were used. Enterococcus faecalis JH22 and Bacillus megaterium MB141 were the most resistant bacteria while Escherichia coli top10 was found highly susceptible and inhibited by all three extracts of Mazus japonicas and Fumaria indica. Vicia sativa was effective only against Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas putida at limited crude extract concentration while all other strains showed resistance against different extracts of the respective plant. Amongst the plant extracts screened for antibacterial activity, methanolic extracts showed best antibacterial activity whereas aqueous and petroleum ether were found least active. This study significantly supports the usage of these widespread weeds as traditional medicines for various bacterial infections.Â

Automatic metal waste separator system in Malaysia

Metal recycling is an issue that needs attention and should be practiced by people as it has many advantages to human and Earth. In order to get a metal from Earth, the process called mining are needed where it can harm our natural resources due to depletion of the area to be mined. If the process is not controlled, most of the areas on Earth will have huge excavation holes. So, people should be responsible to prevent this from happening to preserve the environment in a good quality by recycling the metal material. By metal recycling, it can save an energy and resources as it can reduce the demand for raw materials, hence maintain the natural resources for the future. The proposed automatic metal waste separation system is intended to ease the people to separate the waste material. Besides, it will make the metal recycling industry work easier because the metal waste is already isolated at garbage collection side. The purpose of the project is to design a system to separate the metal recyclable household waste automatically and record the data waste collected. There are total of four detectors used to separate the non-metal, steel, copper and aluminum metal waste. The average time used to complete metal separation process by using the proposed prototype is 14.5 seconds. This project includes a mechanical part, programming part and an electronic design. The system will be programmed using Arduino Mega as a microcontroller to control all the electronic component in the system

Smart street light using intensity controller

Smart street light is an intelligent control of street lights to optimize the problem of power consumption of the street, late in night. Currently, usual street lights are automatically turn on when it becomes dark and turn off when it becomes bright. This is huge waste of energy in the entire world as it is an essential community service, but current implementation is not efficient. Conventional street lights are being replaced by Light Emitting Diode (LED) street lighting system, which reduces the power consumption. The focus of this project is to design a system of street lights controller to provide a reduction in power consumption. The prototype is design by using Light Dependent Resistor (LDR), Infrared sensor (IR), battery and LED. All this component was controlled by Arduino UNO as the microcontroller. The brightness of the lamps is being controlled in this project to reduce the power consumption. The dimming of the lamps depends on the speed of object motion detected such as pedestrians, cyclists and cars. The higher speed of moving object, the greater the level of intensity. For this idea, the innovation of street lights is not quite the same as conventional street lights that are controlled by timer switch or light sensor which automatically turns the street lights on during sunset and off during sunrise. According to the study, motion detection devices may help to save up to 40% of energy per month

Classification of different types of metal from recyclable household waste for automatic waste separation system

Nowadays, solid waste has become a major problem in Malaysia. However, most people in Malaysia are not aware and take this problem for granted. The rising number of population and massive development in recent years indirectly generated an enormous value of household waste, making the household waste the main generator for solid waste in Malaysia. It stated that only 5 percent of an average 30,000 tons of waste have been recycled in Malaysia. The purpose of the paper is to design a system to separate the metal recyclable household waste automatically and record the data waste collected. There are total of four detectors used to separate the non-metal, steel, copper and aluminum metal waste. The average time used to complete metal separation process by using the proposed prototype is 14.5 seconds. This paper includes a mechanical part, programming part, an electronic design and also the data collected from this proposed system. The system will be programmed using Arduino Mega as a microcontroller to control all the electronic component in the system

Material classification of recyclable waste using the weight and size of waste

Nowadays, insufficient landfills problem had increased the needs to decrease the waste and recycling them. However, despite the efforts done by the government and local authorities on promoting recycling culture by introducing new laws and regulations, the awareness and willingness among the community is still low. One of the possible reasons to this is lack of effort to categorize the waste into the designated category which are paper, glass, plastic and metal. In order to address this problem, it is important to design a system that will ease the process of categorizing the waste. This can be achieve by the automation of the said process. In this work, a system consist of an algorithm and hardware to automatically categorize recyclable waste is proposed. The proposed system are utilizing weight sensor and ultrasonic sensors in order to capture the characteristics of the waste item, which are weight and size so that it can be categorized into paper, glass, plastic and metal. Here, an algorithm to compensate minimum usage of hardware, namely the type and number of sensors is presented