In Vitro and In Vivo Evaluation of Diclofenac Sodium Gel Prepared with Cellulose Ether and Carbopol 934P

Purpose: To develop diclofenac sodium gel using high molecular weight hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) and Carbopol 934P for topical and systemic delivery.Methods: Diclofenac sodium gel was prepared with HPMC K100M and Carbopol 934P as gelling agents. The formulations were examined for pH, spreadability, consistency, viscosity, homogeneity, drug content and stability. In vitro drug release was evaluated using Franz diffusion cell. Carrageenaninduced rat paw oedema model was used for the evaluation of the anti-inflammatory activity of the gels. A commercial diclofenac sodium gel product was used as the reference drug.Results: Formulations containing glycerin as permeation enhancer gave drug release patterns comparable to that of the reference product. The drug content of F2, F5 and F9 was 99.81, 99.75 and 99.96 %, respectively. Accelerated stability results showed no significant variation in the appearance and drug release after storage for 3 months.Conclusion: Diclofenac sodium gel containing HPMC K100M and Carbopol 934P exhibited pronounced anti-inflammatory activity and could be further developed for topical and systemic delivery..Keywords: Diclofenac sodium, Anti-inflammatory, Hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, Carbopol, Drug release, Glyceri

miRvestigator: web application to identify miRNAs responsible for co-regulated gene expression patterns discovered through transcriptome profiling

Transcriptome profiling studies have produced staggering numbers of gene co-expression signatures for a variety of biological systems. A significant fraction of these signatures will be partially or fully explained by miRNA-mediated targeted transcript degradation. miRvestigator takes as input lists of co-expressed genes from Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, G. gallus, Homo sapiens, Mus musculus or Rattus norvegicus and identifies the specific miRNAs that are likely to bind to 3′ un-translated region (UTR) sequences to mediate the observed co-regulation. The novelty of our approach is the miRvestigator hidden Markov model (HMM) algorithm which systematically computes a similarity P-value for each unique miRNA seed sequence from the miRNA database miRBase to an overrepresented sequence motif identified within the 3′-UTR of the query genes. We have made this miRNA discovery tool accessible to the community by integrating our HMM algorithm with a proven algorithm for de novo discovery of miRNA seed sequences and wrapping these algorithms into a user-friendly interface. Additionally, the miRvestigator web server also produces a list of putative miRNA binding sites within 3′-UTRs of the query transcripts to facilitate the design of validation experiments. The miRvestigator is freely available at http://mirvestigator.systemsbiology.net

Comparative Microbial Modules Resource: Generation and Visualization of Multi-species Biclusters

The increasing abundance of large-scale, high-throughput datasets for many closely related organisms provides opportunities for comparative analysis via the simultaneous biclustering of datasets from multiple species. These analyses require a reformulation of how to organize multi-species datasets and visualize comparative genomics data analyses results. Recently, we developed a method, multi-species cMonkey, which integrates heterogeneous high-throughput datatypes from multiple species to identify conserved regulatory modules. Here we present an integrated data visualization system, built upon the Gaggle, enabling exploration of our method's results (available at http://meatwad.bio.nyu.edu/cmmr.html). The system can also be used to explore other comparative genomics datasets and outputs from other data analysis procedures – results from other multiple-species clustering programs or from independent clustering of different single-species datasets. We provide an example use of our system for two bacteria, Escherichia coli and Salmonella Typhimurium. We illustrate the use of our system by exploring conserved biclusters involved in nitrogen metabolism, uncovering a putative function for yjjI, a currently uncharacterized gene that we predict to be involved in nitrogen assimilation