Bacteria in cancer therapy: a novel experimental strategy

Resistance to conventional anticancer therapies in patients with advanced solid tumors has prompted the need of alternative cancer therapies. Moreover, the success of novel cancer therapies depends on their selectivity for cancer cells with limited toxicity to normal tissues. Several decades after Coley's work a variety of natural and genetically modified non-pathogenic bacterial species are being explored as potential antitumor agents, either to provide direct tumoricidal effects or to deliver tumoricidal molecules. Live, attenuated or genetically modified non-pathogenic bacterial species are capable of multiplying selectively in tumors and inhibiting their growth. Due to their selectivity for tumor tissues, these bacteria and their spores also serve as ideal vectors for delivering therapeutic proteins to tumors. Bacterial toxins too have emerged as promising cancer treatment strategy. The most potential and promising strategy is bacteria based gene-directed enzyme prodrug therapy. Although it has shown successful results in vivo yet further investigation about the targeting mechanisms of the bacteria are required to make it a complete therapeutic approach in cancer treatment

Counter-current chromatography for the separation of terpenoids: A comprehensive review with respect to the solvent systems employed

Copyright @ 2014 The Authors.This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.Natural products extracts are commonly highly complex mixtures of active compounds and consequently their purification becomes a particularly challenging task. The development of a purification protocol to extract a single active component from the many hundreds that are often present in the mixture is something that can take months or even years to achieve, thus it is important for the natural product chemist to have, at their disposal, a broad range of diverse purification techniques. Counter-current chromatography (CCC) is one such separation technique utilising two immiscible phases, one as the stationary phase (retained in a spinning coil by centrifugal forces) and the second as the mobile phase. The method benefits from a number of advantages when compared with the more traditional liquid-solid separation methods, such as no irreversible adsorption, total recovery of the injected sample, minimal tailing of peaks, low risk of sample denaturation, the ability to accept particulates, and a low solvent consumption. The selection of an appropriate two-phase solvent system is critical to the running of CCC since this is both the mobile and the stationary phase of the system. However, this is also by far the most time consuming aspect of the technique and the one that most inhibits its general take-up. In recent years, numerous natural product purifications have been published using CCC from almost every country across the globe. Many of these papers are devoted to terpenoids-one of the most diverse groups. Naturally occurring terpenoids provide opportunities to discover new drugs but many of them are available at very low levels in nature and a huge number of them still remain unexplored. The collective knowledge on performing successful CCC separations of terpenoids has been gathered and reviewed by the authors, in order to create a comprehensive document that will be of great assistance in performing future purifications. © 2014 The Author(s)

Not Available

Not AvailableThe present study was carried out to assess ichthyofaunal diversity in two tropical floodplain wetlands namely Chatla and Urmal beel of Brahmaputra basin during 2017-18. The study comprising experimental fishing and observation of fish landings reveals 54 fish species belonging to 38 genera, 8 orders and 21 families from Chatla beel and 52 fish species belonging to 37 genera, 8 orders and 21 families recorded from Urmal beel. Cypriniformes was found to be most dominant order representing 23 and 22 species in Chatla and Urmal, respectively. Family-wise distribution shows Cyprinidae as most diversified with 21 and 20 species in Chatla and Urmal respectively. The study revealed 52 species with food value and 15 species with ornamental value from Chatla beel and 50 species with food value and 13 species with ornamental value from Urmal beel. In case of Chatla beel, 3 species are Near Threatened (NT), 1 vulnerable (VU), 1 Endangered (EN), 47 Least Concern (LC) and 2 Data Deficient (DD) and in case of Urmal beel, 3 species are NT, 1 VU, 1 EN, 45 LC and 2 DD as per IUCN.. The present study holds importance as an earlier attempt to study the fish diversity of these two beels.Not Availabl