Antitumorigenic Evaluation of Thalidomide Alone and in Combination with Cisplatin in DBA2/J Mice

Thalidomide's reported ability to inhibit angiogenesis has led to clinical trials determining its effectiveness in combating various types of cancer. This study explored thalidomide's antitumorigenic potential when administered alone and in combination with cisplatin to DBA2/J mice whose tumors were induced by murine erythroleukemic cells. Thalidomide treatment alone produced no significant inhibitory effect on tumor development and metastasis. Mice that received both drugs had significantly lower incidences of both primary and secondary tumors as compared to the untreated control group. Cisplatin, administered alone or in combination with thalidomide, led to a significant delay in tumor formation and a longer life span than was recorded in untreated mice. However, the combination treatment results were not significantly different from those of cisplatin treatment used as a single agent. In in vitro cell multiplication studies using murine erythroleukemic and murine endothelial cells, thalidomide failed to inhibit cell proliferation. However, cisplatin treatment with or without thalidomide, significantly inhibited the multiplication of both cell lines in a dose dependent manner. Thalidomide does not appear to be a beneficial adjuvant to cisplatin treatment

Diffraction of an Off-axis Vector-Beam by a Tilted Aperture

Manifestations of orbital angular momentum induced effects in the diffraction of a radially polarized vector beam by an off-axis tilted aperture are studied both experimentally and theoretically. Experiments were carried out to extract the degree of circular polarization, which was shown to be proportional to the on-axis component of the spin angular momentum density. We report a clear separation of the regions of dominance of the right and left circular polarizations associated with positive and negative topological charges respectively, which is reminiscent of the standard vortex-induced transverse shift, albeit in the diffraction scenario. The experimental results are supported by model simulations and the agreement is quite satisfactory. The results are useful to appreciate the orbit-orbit related effects due to unavoidable misalignment problems (especially for vortex beams)

Violence against women: a study on nature, prevalence and extent

Background: To study the nature, prevalence and extent of domestic violence against women in the study area.Methods: The cross-sectional study was carried out in the urban and rural area of Surendranagar district of Gujarat. Total 600 ever married women of 15-49 years of age were selected for the study purpose. The self-administered questionnaire was used to gather all the information. Steps were taken up to maintain confidentiality.Results: Out of total 600 women, 231 (38.5%) were victims of domestic violence in one form or the other. The analysis based on each form of violence discloses that about 83% were victims of psychological violence, about 54% of the victims had experienced physical violence, about 32% were victims of economical violence and about 24% were victims of sexual violence.Conclusions: Husband was the frequent instigator of domestic violence. Psychological violence is the commonest form of violence experienced by the victims

Anisotropy in the helicity modulus of a quantum 3D XY-model: application to YBCO

We present a variational study of the helicity moduli of an anisotropic quantum three-dimensional (3D) XY-model of YBCO in superconducting state. It is found that both the ab-plane and the c-axis helicity moduli, which are proportional to the inverse square of the corresponding magnetic field penetration depth, vary with temperature T as T to the fourth power in the zero temperature limit. Moreover, the c-axis helicity modulus drops with temperature much faster than the ab-plane helicity modulus because of the weaker Josephson couplings along the c-axis compared to those along the ab-plane. These findings are in disagreement with the experiments on high quality samples of YBCO.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Casimir force on interacting Bose-Einstein condensate

We have presented an analytic theory for the Casimir force on a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) which is confined between two parallel plates. We have considered Dirichlet boundary conditions for the condensate wave function as well as for the phonon field. We have shown that, the condensate wave function (which obeys the Gross-Pitaevskii equation) is responsible for the mean field part of Casimir force, which usually dominates over the quantum (fluctuations) part of the Casimir force.Comment: Accepted in Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physic

Excess energy of an ultracold Fermi gas in a trapped geometry

We have analytically explored finite size and interparticle interaction corrections to the average energy of a harmonically trapped Fermi gas below and above the Fermi temperature, and have obtained a better fitting for the excess energy reported by DeMarco and Jin [Science $\textbf{285}$, 1703 (1999)]. We have presented a perturbative calculation within a mean field approximation.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; Accepted in European Physical Journal

Paradigm of tunable clustering using binarization of consensus partition matrices (Bi-CoPaM) for gene discovery

Copyright @ 2013 Abu-Jamous et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Clustering analysis has a growing role in the study of co-expressed genes for gene discovery. Conventional binary and fuzzy clustering do not embrace the biological reality that some genes may be irrelevant for a problem and not be assigned to a cluster, while other genes may participate in several biological functions and should simultaneously belong to multiple clusters. Also, these algorithms cannot generate tight clusters that focus on their cores or wide clusters that overlap and contain all possibly relevant genes. In this paper, a new clustering paradigm is proposed. In this paradigm, all three eventualities of a gene being exclusively assigned to a single cluster, being assigned to multiple clusters, and being not assigned to any cluster are possible. These possibilities are realised through the primary novelty of the introduction of tunable binarization techniques. Results from multiple clustering experiments are aggregated to generate one fuzzy consensus partition matrix (CoPaM), which is then binarized to obtain the final binary partitions. This is referred to as Binarization of Consensus Partition Matrices (Bi-CoPaM). The method has been tested with a set of synthetic datasets and a set of five real yeast cell-cycle datasets. The results demonstrate its validity in generating relevant tight, wide, and complementary clusters that can meet requirements of different gene discovery studies.National Institute for Health Researc

Biophysical Characterization of the Type III Secretion Tip Proteins and the Tip Proteins Attached to Bacterium-Like Particles

Bacterium-like particles (BLPs), derived from Lactococcus lactis, offer a self-adjuvanting delivery vehicle for subunit protein vaccines. Proteins can be specifically loaded onto the BLPs via a peptidoglycan anchoring domain (PA). In this study, the tip proteins IpaD, SipD and LcrV belonging to type three secretion systems of Shigella flexneri, Salmonella enterica and Yersinia enterocolitica, respectively, were fused to the PA and loaded onto the BLPs. Herein, we biophysically characterized these nine samples and condensed the spectroscopic results into three-index empirical phase diagrams (EPDs). The EPDs show distinctions between the IpaD/SipD and LcrV subfamilies of tip proteins, based on their physical stability, even upon addition of the PA. Upon attachment to the BLPs, the BLPs become defining moiety in the spectroscopic measurements, leaving the tip proteins to have a subtle yet modulating effect on the structural integrity of the tip proteins-BLPs binding. In summary, this work provides a comprehensive view of physical stability of the tip proteins and tip protein-BLPs and serves as a baseline for screening of excipients to increase the stability of the tip protein-BLPs for future vaccine formulation