Amino Acid-Directed Therapy to Overcome Parasite-Induced Malnutrition

Giardia is an enteric parasite which serves as a major public health concern globally. Through ubiquitous spread in contaminated water supplies and areas of poor sanitation, Giardia infection can cause both acute gastrointestinal symptoms and longer-term sequelae associated with stunting and wasting of malnourished children. Giardia metabolism is heavily reliant on arginine, which the parasite may sequester from the host or host dietary intake. Arginine is also central to host health, including immune function and host growth. Thus, this study investigated the relationship between Giardia and host metabolism of arginine during infection, and the ability of arginine supplementation to protect against Giardia infection and associated growth hindrances. Using a murine model of protein deficiency, we expected to see a protective effect of arginine, both in mitigating Giardia intestinal colonization and in preventing growth decreases. However, arginine supplementation was not found to have a broadly protective nor adverse effect on host in growth markers during infection or in controls. Giardia intestinal colonization was also not observed to fully deplete the host of arginine upon infection. Further implications and future directions for research are discussed.Bachelor of Science in Public Healt

A rare case of obstructed lumbar hernia: case report

Lumbar hernias are quite uncommon as compared to other ventral abdominal wall hernias, accounting for less than 1.5% of all abdominal hernias, with fewer than 300 cases reported over the past 300 years. About 25% of all lumbar hernias have a traumatic etiology. This may be post-surgical or following blunt injuries associated with intra-abdominal injuries. The management of such patients constitutes a surgical challenge. Clinical diagnosis of this entity is difficult due to non-specific symptoms. The diagnosis is particularly elusive in obese individuals or in post-surgical patients. Though rare defects, lumbar hernias are prone to incarceration and strangulation. CECT will provide valuable insight into diagnosis of lumbar hernia especially if obstructed or strangulated. Here we present a case report of a rare presentation of obstructed lumbar hernia diagnosed with CT scan and managed with exploratory laparotomy

Analysis and Measurement of the Throughput of WLAN 802.11a/b/g for KM SHAW Hall of Residence NIT Rourkela Using Qualnet

Wi-Fi sprang came into existence as a result of the decision of the federal communication commission(FCC) to open several wireless spectrum for use without a government license. In 1990, a new committee called 802.11 was set up to look into getting standard started. Today 802.11 is rapidly proliferating all over the planet. Nonetheless it still faces number of technological challenges. A major one is the range thefarthest the device can currently stray and still receive the signal from an 802.11 access point is about 300 feet ans if there are no major walls or building or substantial physical obstructionOther major challenges is how to improve the data throughput speeds enhance security and quality of service. Throughput is the measure of the capacity of any communication channel.Qualnet is a suitable tool for this project due to its easy-to-use user interface to the establish various graphs which are useful for camparison of the performance of the Wlan at different speed. A complete analysis have been carried out for performance of the Wlan at speed support by 802.11b standard 1Mbps,2Mbps,5.5Mbps and 11Mbps, also energy consumption, total number of bytes sent and received

Smart Walking System based on Artificial Intelligence

This paper shows the smart walking stick based on ultrasonic sensors and Arduino for outwardly debilitated individuals. There are roughly 37 million individuals over the globe who are visually impaired as indicated by the World Health Organization. Individuals with visual inabilities are regularly subjected to outer help which can be given by people, trained dogs, or electronic gadgets as supportive networks for basic assistance. Thus, this played as the motivation to develop a smart cane white stick to survive these restrictions which includes ultrasonic sensors at particular positions to the stick that gave data about nature to the client by initiating the signal sound and vibrations. We proposed minimal effort and light weight framework structured with micro controller that processes signal and alerts the visually impaired person over any obstacle, water or dark areas through beeping sounds or vibrations. The system comprises of obstacle and moisture detection sensors for process of receiving, processing and sending signals to the alarm system which finally alerts the user for prompt action. The system was designed, programmed using Java language and tried for exactness by the visually impaired. Our gadget can recognize obstacle inside the separation of around 2m from the client

Peripheral blood gene expression: it all boils down to the RNA collection tubes

Background: Gene expression profiling from peripheral blood is a valuable tool for biomarker discovery in clinical studies. Different whole blood RNA collection and processing methods are highly variable and might confound comparisons of results across studies. The main aim of the study was to compare genome-wide gene expression profiles obtained from the two widely used commercially available whole blood RNA collection systems - PAXgene and Tempus tubes. Comparisons of present call rates, variances, correlations and influence of globin reduction across the two collection systems was performed using in vivo glucocorticoid stimulation in 24 peripheral blood samples from three individuals. Results: RNA quality, yield and numbers of detected transcripts from the two RNA collection systems was comparable, with no significant differences between the tube types. Globin reduction resulted in a significant increase in present call rates (p = 8.17 × 10 -5 and p = 1.95 × 10 -3 in PAXgene and Tempus tubes respectively) and significant decrease in gene expression variance in both RNA collection tubes (p = 0.0025 and p = 0.041 in PAXgene and Tempus tubes respectively). Comparisons of glucocorticoid receptor-stimulated gene expression profiles between the two collection tube systems revealed an overlap of only 17 to 54%, depending on the stringency level of the statistical thresholds. This overlap increased by 1-8% when the RNA samples were processed to remove the globin mRNA. Conclusion: RNA obtained from PAXgene and Tempus tubes was comparable in terms of quality and yield, however, detectable gene expression changes after glucocorticoid receptor stimulation were distinct, with an overlap of only up to 46% between the two collection systems. This overlap increased to 54% when the samples were depleted of globin mRNA and drastically reduced to 17-18% when only gene expression differences with a fold change greater than 2.0 were assessed. These results indicate that gene expression profiles obtained from PAXgene and Tempus differ drastically and should not be analyzed together. These data suggest that researchers must exert caution while interpreting expression profiles obtained through different RNA collection tubes.</p

Neuromuscular Control and Performance Differences Associated With Gender and Obesity in Fatiguing Tasks Performed by Older Adults

Obesity rates in the geriatric population have emerged as a serious health concern in recent decades. Yet, obesity-related differences in neuromuscular performance and motor control during fatiguing tasks, and how they are modified by gender, specifically among older adults, are still largely unexplored. The first aim of this study was to understand obesity and gender-related differences in endurance time among older adults. Motor variability has been linked with inter-individual differences in the rate of fatigue development, and as potentially revealing underlying mechanisms of neuromuscular control. Hence, the second and third aims of this study were to investigate to what extent motor variability at baseline could predict inter-individual differences in endurance time, and whether systematic obesity and gender differences exist in motor variability among older adults. Fifty-nine older adults (65 years or older) were recruited into four groups: obese male, obese female, non-obese male, and non-obese female. Participants performed submaximal intermittent isometric knee extensions until exhaustion. Knee extension force and muscle activation signals (surface electromyography) of a primary agonist muscle, the Vastus Lateralis (VL), were collected. Endurance time and metrics quantifying both the size and structure of variability were computed for the force and EMG signals, using coefficient of variation (within cycles and between cycles) and sample entropy measures. While group differences in endurance time were primarily associated with gender, adding individual motor variability measures as predictor variables explained significantly more variance in endurance time, thus highlighting the relevance of motor variability in understanding neuromotor control strategies. Males exhibited longer endurance times, higher EMG CV, lower EMG SaEn, lower force CV, and higher force SaEn than females. These findings are interpreted to indicate males as using a motor strategy involving better “distribution” of the neural efforts across synergists and antagonists to achieve better performance during the knee extension task. No obesity-related changes in endurance time were found. However, obese individuals exhibited a greater cycle-to-cycle variability in muscle activation, indicating a larger alteration in the recruitment of motor units across successive contractions and potentially increased neural costs, which may have contributed to comparable endurance time and performance as non-obese older adults

Research Review: Polygenic methods and their application to psychiatric traits

Despite evidence from twin and family studies for an important contribution of genetic factors to both childhood and adult onset psychiatric disorders, identifying robustly associated specific DNA variants has proved challenging. In the pregenomics era the genetic architecture (number, frequency and effect size of risk variants) of complex genetic disorders was unknown. Empirical evidence for the genetic architecture of psychiatric disorders is emerging from the genetic studies of the last 5 years. Methods and scope: We review the methods investigating the polygenic nature of complex disorders. We provide mini-guides to genomic profile (or polygenic) risk scoring and to estimation of variance (or heritability) from common SNPs; a glossary of key terms is also provided. We review results of applications of the methods to psychiatric disorders and related traits and consider how these methods inform on missing heritability, hidden heritability and still-missing heritability. Findings: Genome-wide genotyping and sequencing studies are providing evidence that psychiatric disorders are truly polygenic, that is they have a genetic architecture of many genetic variants, including risk variants that are both common and rare in the population. Sample sizes published to date are mostly underpowered to detect effect sizes of the magnitude presented by nature, and these effect sizes may be constrained by the biological validity of the diagnostic constructs. Conclusions: Increasing the sample size for genome wide association studies of psychiatric disorders will lead to the identification of more associated genetic variants, as already found for schizophrenia. These loci provide the starting point of functional analyses that might eventually lead to new prevention and treatment options and to improved biological validity of diagnostic constructs. Polygenic analyses will contribute further to our understanding of complex genetic traits as sample sizes increase and as sample resources become richer in phenotypic descriptors, both in terms of clinical symptoms and of nongenetic risk factors

Analysis of conjunctival fibroblasts from a proband with Schnyder corneal dystrophy

Molecular Vision141277-128

PLAS-5k: Dataset of Protein-Ligand Affinities from Molecular Dynamics for Machine Learning Applications

Computational methods and recently modern machine learning methods have played a key role in structure-based drug design. Though several benchmarking datasets are available for machine learning applications in virtual screening, accurate prediction of binding affinity for a protein-ligand complex remains a major challenge. New datasets that allow for the development of models for predicting binding affinities better than the state-of-the-art scoring functions are important. For the first time, we have developed a dataset, PLAS-5k comprised of 5000 protein-ligand complexes chosen from PDB database. The dataset consists of binding affinities along with energy components like electrostatic, van der Waals, polar and non-polar solvation energy calculated from molecular dynamics simulations using MMPBSA (Molecular Mechanics Poisson-Boltzmann Surface Area) method. The calculated binding affinities outperformed docking scores and showed a good correlation with the available experimental values. The availability of energy components may enable optimization of desired components during machine learning-based drug design. Further, OnionNet model has been retrained on PLAS-5k dataset and is provided as a baseline for the prediction of binding affinities

OPTIMIZATION OF PAPAIN EXTRACTION BY AQUEOUS TWO-PHASE SYSTEM (ATPS) USING RESPONSE SURFACE METHODOLOGY (RSM)

Abstract: This work attempts to study and optimize aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) made of PEG, sodium carbonate and PEG, sodium sulphate. Three factors ;PEG concentration, salt concentration and pH affecting the papain partitioning were studied. The statistical analysis showed that for both systems the phase forming salt concentration significantly affect the &quot;K&quot; value for papain partitioning. However, the performance of PEG/Na 2 CO 3 system was generally better than PEG/Na 2 SO 4 system. Hence, detail study was carried out on the PEG/Sodium carbonate system using CCRD (Central Composite Rotatable Design) in Response Surface Methodology (RSM). The optimal condition gave a &quot;K&quot; value of partitioning of 1.51 with a yield of 76%