Pharmacognostical, Phytochemical and Pharmacological profile of Colebrookea oppositifolia Smith

Colebrookea oppositifolia commonly known as ‘Bhaman’ is distributed throughout India from the Himalayas down to Deccan. The plant is used traditionally as such as dermatitis, dysentery, fever, headache, peptic ulcer, haemostatic, wounds, as anti-fertility agent, fungicide, and the roots of the plant has been most widely used for the treatment of epilepsy.. Medicinally, it has been proven to possess various pharmacological activities like treating corneal opacity or conjunctivitis, sore eyes due to its anti-inflammatory properties, cardioprotective, hepatoprotective, anti-inflammatory, antihelmintic, antifungal, antioxidant, antimicrobial, antinociceptive, cytotoxic activity, anticonvulsant, antiulcer, antimicrobial, anti-fertility, antipyretic and insecticide. Further, studies reveal the presence of various phytochemical constituents mainly flavone glycosides viz. chrysin, negletein, landenein; leaves contain 5,6,7- tri-methoxyflavone, 5,6,7,4'-tetramethoxyflavone, acteoside, and quercetin in the bark; root contains stearic, palmitic, oleic acids, triacontanol, flavone glycoside echioidin, 5,6,7-trimethoxyflavone and 4',5,6,7- tetra methoxy flavone; sugars and vitamins have also been isolated from this plant. These studies reveal that Colebrookea oppositifolia is a source of medicinally active compounds and have various pharmacological effects; hence, this drug encourage finding its new therapeutic uses. Keywords: Colebrookea oppositifolia, wound healing, anticonvulsant, Lamiacea

Efficacy and safety of apremilast versus dapsone versus colchicine in recurrent aphthous stomatitis: a three arm double blinded comparative study

Background: Recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS) is often considered as an incurable ailment. Therefore, an effective management option is required for controlling the symptoms and severity of RAS. We aimed to conduct a study to compare the effectiveness and safety profile of apremilast, dapsone and colchicine in management of RAS. Methods: This three-arm double blinded comparative study included 60 cases of recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS). Twenty patients each were randomly allocated in three groups: group A (apremilast), group B (dapsone) and group C (colchicine). Results: At the end of 6 weeks, the complete response was seen in 6 (30%) patients in group A as compared to 2 (10%) and 4 (20%) patients in group B and C (p >0.05). At the end of 12 weeks, response rate became statistically significant (p=0.003) with complete response in 14 (70%) of patients. Median time to recurrence, defined as oral ulcer after loss of complete response, was significantly increased to 4.3 weeks in group A as compared to group B and C. The most commonly encountered side effects were gastrointestinal in all three groups. None of the adverse effects resulted in discontinuation of treatment, hospitalization or death in any patient. Conclusions: Although, traditional therapies like dapsone and colchicine have been commonly used in clinical practice, apremilast yielded a rapid and maintained improvement of RAS

A systematic review on Drug Re-profiling/Re-Purposing

Hardcore capability of drug repurposing has allowed rising population of diversified diseased patients to approach various medications with known safety profiles. In an ongoing scenario considering current pharmaceutical market, we have numerous drugs that are approved and repurposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Developing and bringing a novel drug molecule from the laboratory to a market requires a lot of investment in terms of money, efforts, and time. On the other hand, repurposing a drug holds the capability of bringing out best cures with harmless, ease availability and inexpensive quality. Sildenafil, Chloroquine, Metformin are some examples of repurposed drug used in multiple disease models. Despite numerous challenges, drug repurposing stood to be a core component to any comprehensive drug re-discovering strategies which has been planned to bring benefit to the patients suffering from a wide variety of dreadful ailments. In this review, we have discussed the various repurposed drugs in numerous types of cancer, deadly novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and some orphan diseases. This paper holds various examples of drugs which are still under clinical trial and have high chances of being approved as repurposed drugs benefitting humankind

A Deep Multi-Level Attentive network for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention with broad application prospects. The existing methods focuses on single modality, which fails to capture the social media content for multiple modalities. Moreover, in multi-modal learning, most of the works have focused on simply combining the two modalities, without exploring the complicated correlations between them. This resulted in dissatisfying performance for multimodal sentiment classification. Motivated by the status quo, we propose a Deep Multi-Level Attentive network, which exploits the correlation between image and text modalities to improve multimodal learning. Specifically, we generate the bi-attentive visual map along the spatial and channel dimensions to magnify CNNs representation power. Then we model the correlation between the image regions and semantics of the word by extracting the textual features related to the bi-attentive visual features by applying semantic attention. Finally, self-attention is employed to automatically fetch the sentiment-rich multimodal features for the classification. We conduct extensive evaluations on four real-world datasets, namely, MVSA-Single, MVSA-Multiple, Flickr, and Getty Images, which verifies the superiority of our method.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

In Silico Characterization of Pectate Lyase Protein Sequences from Different Source Organisms

A total of 121 protein sequences of pectate lyases were subjected to homology search, multiple sequence alignment, phylogenetic tree construction, and motif analysis. The phylogenetic tree constructed revealed different clusters based on different source organisms representing bacterial, fungal, plant, and nematode pectate lyases. The multiple accessions of bacterial, fungal, nematode, and plant pectate lyase protein sequences were placed closely revealing a sequence level similarity. The multiple sequence alignment of these pectate lyase protein sequences from different source organisms showed conserved regions at different stretches with maximum homology from amino acid residues 439–467, 715–816, and 829–910 which could be used for designing degenerate primers or probes specific for pectate lyases. The motif analysis revealed a conserved Pec_Lyase_C domain uniformly observed in all pectate lyases irrespective of variable sources suggesting its possible role in structural and enzymatic functions

Genetic diversity analysis of Nardostachys jatamansi DC, an endangered medicinal plant of Central Himalaya, using random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers

The genetic diversity analysis of eight populations of Nardostachys jatamansi DC. collected from different altitude of Central Himalaya has been attempted using 24 sets of random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) primers. These sets of RAPD marker generated a total of 346 discernible and reproducible bands across the analysed population with 267 polymorphic and 75 monomorphic bands. The unweighted pair group method with arithmetic average (UPGMA) cluster analysis revealed three distinct clusters: I, II and III. The cluster I was represented by N. jatamansi population collected from Panwali Kantha (3200 m asl) and Kedarnath (3584 m asl), India together with Jumla (2562 m asl) from Nepal. Cluster II included collections from Har Ki Doon (3400 m asl) and Tungnath (3600 m asl) from India while Cluster III was represented by collections from Munsiyari (2380 m asl), Dayara (3500 m asl) and Valley of Flowers (3400 m asl) from India. The clustering of these populations was independent of variations in altitude and geographical locations. The genetic variations observed in different populations of Jatamansi might be due to environmental influences (biotic and abiotic), rather than altitude level differences. The abiotic (geographical or climatic differentiation) and biotic (pollination between population and seed dispersal) factors might be responsible for the genetic variations among these accessions of Jatamansi.Keywords: Genetic diversity, random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD), Nardostachys jatamansi, Central Himalaya, unweighted pair group method with arithmetic average (UPGMA)African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(20), pp. 2816-282

Dyke-Davidoff-Masson syndrome as sequelae of typhoid encephalitis?

Dyke-Davidoff-Masson syndrome (DDMS) is characterized by cerebral hemiatrophy with homolateral hypertrophy ofthe skull and sinuses in association with contralateral hemiplegia, seizures, mental retardation, difficulty, and impairmentof speech development. Among the various complications of typhoid fever, neuropsychiatric manifestations constitutea major portion. However, DDMS post typhoid encephalitis has not been reported in the literature. We report a case ofDDMS in an 8-year-old boy who presented with multiple seizures, impaired speech, behavioral changes, and mentalretardation following typhoid encephalitis

Formulation development and in vitro characterization of bilayer and floating-bioadhesive tablets of propranolol hydrochloride

Abstract The aim of the present research was to develop a bilayer and floating-bioadhesive drug delivery system exhibiting a unique combination of floatation and bioadhesion to prolong residence in the stomach using propranolol hydrochloride as a model drug. The sustained layer was compressed and granules of the floating layer were added to it then both layers were compressed using a single station rotary press. Granules and tablets were characterized using the official method. Hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC