Comparative study of biochemical and hematological features in reared sturgeons

Suitable physiological condition in fishes for the selection of broodfishes can be achieved through hematological studies. The present study aimed to examin the hematological indices in Juvenile Sturgeons at different stages of growth. Total albumin content in blood serum, hemoglobin concentration, the erythrocyte and leukocyte count of 54 sturgeon specimens (Persian sturgeon Acipenser persicus and Great sturgeon Huso huso) were determined at the age of 1, 2 and 6 years reared fish. In the Persian sturgeon specimens studied, total albumin concentration increased from 26.1 to 52.5 gL-1, hemoglobin from 42.2 to 65.8 gL-1, erythrocyte count from 240 to 452.5 thousand cells/ μL-1, and leukocyte count from 17.4 to 46.7 thousand cells/ μL-1. The total leukocyte was composed of 73.2-82.7% lymphocytes, 12.3 to 20% neutrophils, 2.2 to 6.5% eosinophils and 0.2 to 2.5% monocytes with the increase of age. In the great sturgeon specimens studied, total albumin concentrations in blood increased from 20 to 42.4 g L-1, hemoglobin from 46.3 to 78.6 g L-1, and erythrocyte count from 495 to 735 thousand cells μL-1. The total leukocyte was composed of 54.5 to 67.5% lymphocytes, 6.1 to 26.9 % neutrophils, 6.6 to 13.25% eosinophils and 0.6 to 2.5% monocytes with the increase of age.This research revealed the evolutionary trends of hematological features in the natural growth and development of sturgeons in the South Caspian Sea, reared in artificial conditions and shows that with the increase in age, the hematological indices also increased

Antioxidant activity and properties of walnut brown seed coat extract

To date, there are few studies about the properties of walnut brown seed coat. The antioxidant activity and properties of walnut brown seed coat was considered in this study and the amounts of carotenoids, chlorophylla, chlorophyllb, vitamin E were determined. The antioxidant activity was determined by cupric assay, DPPH, and measurement of oxidative stability in sunflower oil against Copper sulfate. Walnut brown seed coat at 1 was effective antioxidant in comparison to BHT in inhibition of lipid peroxidation. This extract presented the highest vitamin E level (1.4± 0.042 mg/g). DPPH assay showed the extract had the high radical scavenging ability. The results of this study showed the walnut brown seed coat possessed strong antioxidant properties in vitro, hence it might be beneficial in human health. © 2009-2016, JGPT

Herbalism in Iran: A systematic review

Historically because of safety of use, efficiency, cultural acceptability, and fewer side effects, herbal drugs have been frequently used in most communities. In light of acceptability of use and convenient accessibility to these plants among Iranians as well as possible side effects due to inappropriate use of them, this review article sought to investigate the attitudes toward use of herbal drugs and the used doses and methods of preparation and use of these plants among Iranians. In this review article, firstly 55 articles in Persian and English languages were examined and 30 articles were excluded from the study because of containing irrelevant content. After detailed analysis of 25 articles, 15 articles were selected and their findings were presented with regards to the purposes of this review article. Overall, 73.5% of women and 72% of men in Iran (totally 71.5% of Iranians) use herbal drugs, 82.9% of the people consider use of herbal drugs as effective, and 41.8% use them as tea. The sources of information are relatives and acquaintances for 37.5% of the Iran and Echium L., Valerianaceae officinalis L. Sisymbrium L. were the most frequently used herbal drugs. Herbal drugs are used mostly for gastrointestinal problems followed by respiratory problems, neurological problems, genitourinary problems and metabolic diseases. In view of high consumption of herbal drugs in Iran, potential side effects due to their excessive use, and current campaigns encouraging further use of them, it is necessary for experts, to offer necessary training on the preparation, dosage, maintenance, and side effects of herbal drugs to Iranians at various classes

Water osmolarity effect on spermatocrit and its relations to spermatozoan count in male breeders of Rutilus frisii kutum in the south-westen of the Caspian Sea

The relationship between morphometric characteristics, motile spermatozoan percentage and sperm motility duration among male breeders of Rutilus frisii kutum in four different rivers (Shirud, Khoshkrud, Sefidrud and Chalevand) of the southwestern part of the Caspian Sea and water osmolarity, pH and temperature in four region of each river (estuary, river entrance to sea, artificial reproduction site and upstream) were considered. The mean motility duration time was 37.2±4.2, 41.4±3.9, 52.9±2.1 and 47.8±3.4 in the four rivers respectively. Also, the percentage of motile cells was found to be 49±4.1, 58.2±6.8, 74±4.8 and 68.1±5.9 % for the rivers respectively. The mean osmolarity, temperature and pH were 71.7±66, 62.5±85.5, 40.2±34.2, 36.7±34.4 mOsml/l, 14, 15, 13.6±0.2, 14 degree C and 7.6~c0.1, 7.2±0.1, 7.4±0.1 and 7.2±0.1 respectively. Our findings showed that there is a positive relationship between motile spermatozoan percentage and duration of motility. With the decrease in river water osmolarity from estuaries up to the river upstream, the motile spermatozoan percentage and their duration increased. According to anadromous behavior of the fish, with increasing distance from artificial breeding sites toward river upstream, quantity of spermatozoa and spermatozoan activity increased enhancing success in fertilization attempts

Plantago: A plant for internists

Plantago belongs to the Plantaginaceae family, with two species known as Plantago ovate Forsk and Plantago psyllium L. In herbal medicine Plantago husk powder is commonly as laxative. Application of Psyllium husk as a hydrocolloid fiber has been almost confirmed in treatment of diabetes type 2. Recent researches on Plantago indicate the effect of its fibers on reducing cholesterol, blood lipid and blood glucose of people with diabetes and reducing the risk of colon cancer. There are no side effects reported for patients under treatment with Plantago fiber. Regarding the fact that Psyllium is widely used, different aspects of it is discussed in the present study

An ethnobotanical study of medicinal plants administered for the treatment of hypertension

Introduction: The incidence of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is very high in human societies and their prevention and treatment are the most important priority in many countries. Hypertension makes an important contribution to the development of CVDs. Objectives: This study aimed to collect the ethno-medicinal knowledge of the traditional healers of Shiraz on medicinal plants used in the treatment of hypertension. Materials and Methods: Ethno-medicinal data were collected from September 2012 to July 2013 through direct interview. Twenty-five healers were interviewed using semi-structured questionnaires and their traditional ethno-medicinal knowledge was recorded. Questionnaires were included apothecary personal information, plant local name, plant parts used, method of preparation, season of harvest and traditional use. Data collected from surveys and interviews were transferred to Microsoft Excel 2007 and analyzed. Results: Analysis of data showed that, 27 medicinal plants from 22 families are used for the treatment of hypertension. The families with most antihypertensive species were Apiaceae (8), Rosaceae (8) and Papaveraceae (8). The most frequently used plant parts were leaves (36) followed by fruits (30), aerial part (17) and branches (7). The most frequently used preparation method was decoction (95). Borago officinalis (51.85), Berberis vulgaris (51.58) had the highest frequency of mention. Conclusion: The ethno-medicinal survey of medicinal plants recommended by traditional healers for the treatment of hypertension provides new areas of research on the antihypertensive effect of medicinal plants. In the case of safety and effectiveness, they can be refined and processed to produce natural drugs

Dual Averaging Method for Online Graph-structured Sparsity

Online learning algorithms update models via one sample per iteration, thus efficient to process large-scale datasets and useful to detect malicious events for social benefits, such as disease outbreak and traffic congestion on the fly. However, existing algorithms for graph-structured models focused on the offline setting and the least square loss, incapable for online setting, while methods designed for online setting cannot be directly applied to the problem of complex (usually non-convex) graph-structured sparsity model. To address these limitations, in this paper we propose a new algorithm for graph-structured sparsity constraint problems under online setting, which we call \textsc{GraphDA}. The key part in \textsc{GraphDA} is to project both averaging gradient (in dual space) and primal variables (in primal space) onto lower dimensional subspaces, thus capturing the graph-structured sparsity effectively. Furthermore, the objective functions assumed here are generally convex so as to handle different losses for online learning settings. To the best of our knowledge, \textsc{GraphDA} is the first online learning algorithm for graph-structure constrained optimization problems. To validate our method, we conduct extensive experiments on both benchmark graph and real-world graph datasets. Our experiment results show that, compared to other baseline methods, \textsc{GraphDA} not only improves classification performance, but also successfully captures graph-structured features more effectively, hence stronger interpretability.Comment: 11 pages, 14 figure

Adiabatic quantum algorithm for search engine ranking

We propose an adiabatic quantum algorithm for generating a quantum pure state encoding of the PageRank vector, the most widely used tool in ranking the relative importance of internet pages. We present extensive numerical simulations which provide evidence that this algorithm can prepare the quantum PageRank state in a time which, on average, scales polylogarithmically in the number of webpages. We argue that the main topological feature of the underlying web graph allowing for such a scaling is the out-degree distribution. The top ranked $\log(n)$ entries of the quantum PageRank state can then be estimated with a polynomial quantum speedup. Moreover, the quantum PageRank state can be used in "q-sampling" protocols for testing properties of distributions, which require exponentially fewer measurements than all classical schemes designed for the same task. This can be used to decide whether to run a classical update of the PageRank.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; closer to published versio