929 research outputs found
Production of electrospun fast-dissolving drug delivery systems with therapeutic eutectic systems encapsulated in gelatin
Fast-dissolving delivery systems (FDDS) have received increasing attention in
the last years. Oral drug delivery is still the preferred route for the administration of
pharmaceutical ingredients. Nevertheless, some patients, e.g. children or elderly people, have
difficulties in swallowing solid tablets. In this work, gelatin membranes were produced by
electrospinning, containing an encapsulated therapeutic deep-eutectic solvent (THEDES)
composed by choline chloride/mandelic acid, in a 1:2 molar ratio. A gelatin solution (30% w/
v) with 2% (v/v) of THEDES was used to produce electrospun fibers and the experimental
parameters were optimized. Due to the high surface area of polymer fibers, this type of
construct has wide applicability. With no cytotoxicity effect, and showing a fast-dissolving
release profile in PBS, the gelatin fibers with encapsulated THEDES seem to have promising
applications in the development of new drug delivery systems.The research leading to these results has received
funding from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
(FCT) through the projects ENIGMA - PTDC/EQU-EPR/
121491/2010 and UID/CTM/50025/2013, LAQVREQUIMTE:
UID/QUI/50006/2013, UCIBIO-REQUIMTE:
UID/Multi/04378/2013 (co-financed by the ERDF under the
PT2020 Partnership Agreement [POCI-01-0145-FEDER-
007728]) and by FEDER through the COMPETE 2020
Programme. Marta Martins is grateful for financial support
from FCT through the grant BIM/PTDC/EQUEPR/121491/
2010/ENIGMA. This research has also received funding from
the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/
2007-2013) under grant agreement number REGPOTCT2012-316331-POLARIS and from the project BNovel
smart and biomimetic materials for innovative regenerative medicine approaches^ RL1 - ABMR - NORTE-01-0124- FEDER-000016) co-financed by North Portugal Regional
Operational Programme (ON.2 – O Novo Norte), under the
National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through
the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Bioassay guided purification of the antimicrobial fraction of a Brazilian propolis from Bahia state
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Brazilian propolis type 6 (Atlantic forest, Bahia) is distinct from the other types of propolis especially due to absence of flavonoids and presence of other non-polar, long chain compounds, but presenting good <it>in vitro </it>and <it>in vivo </it>antimicrobial activity. Several authors have suggested that fatty acids found in this propolis might be responsible for its antimicrobial activity; however, so far no evidence concerning this finding has been reported in the literature. The goals of this study were to evaluate the antibacterial activity of the main pure fatty acids in the ethanolic extract and fractions and elucidate the chemical nature of the bioactive compounds isolated from Brazilian propolis type 6.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Brazilian propolis type 6 ethanolic extract (EEP), hexane fraction (H-Fr), major fatty acids, and isolated sub-fractions were analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), high resolution gas chromatography with flame ionization detection (HRGC-FID), and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Three sub-fractions of H-Fr were obtained through preparative HPLC. Antimicrobial activity of EEP, H-Fr, sub-fractions, and fatty acids were tested against <it>Staphyloccus aureus </it>ATCC 25923 and <it>Streptococcus mutans </it>Ingbritt 1600 using minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>EEP and H-Fr inhibited the growth of the microorganisms tested; nevertheless, no antimicrobial activity was found for the major fatty acids. The three sub-fractions (1, 2, and 3) were isolated from H-Fr by preparative HPLC and only sub-fraction 1 showed antimicrobial activity.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>a) The major fatty acids tested were not responsible for the antimicrobial activity of propolis type 6; b) Sub-fraction 1, belonging to the benzophenone class, was responsible for the antimicrobial activity observed in the present study. The identification of the bioactive compound will improve the development of more efficient uses of this natural product.</p
Uncovering the nutritional landscape of food
Recent progresses in data-driven analysis methods, including network-based
approaches, are revolutionizing many classical disciplines. These techniques
can also be applied to food and nutrition, which must be studied to design
healthy diets. Using nutritional information from over 1,000 raw foods, we
systematically evaluated the nutrient composition of each food in regards to
satisfying daily nutritional requirements. The nutrient balance of a food was
quantified herein as nutritional fitness, using the food's frequency of
occurrence in nutritionally adequate food combinations. Nutritional fitness
offers prioritization of recommendable foods within a global network of foods,
in which foods are connected based on the similarities of their nutrient
compositions. We identified a number of key nutrients, such as choline and
alpha-linolenic acid, whose levels in foods can critically affect the foods'
nutritional fitness. Analogously, pairs of nutrients can have the same effect.
In fact, two nutrients can impact the nutritional fitness synergistically,
although the individual nutrients alone may not. This result, involving the
tendency among nutrients to show correlations in their abundances across foods,
implies a hidden layer of complexity when exploring for foods whose balance of
nutrients within pairs holistically helps meet nutritional requirements.
Interestingly, foods with high nutritional fitness successfully maintain this
nutrient balance. This effect expands our scope to a diverse repertoire of
nutrient-nutrient correlations, integrated under a common network framework
that yields unexpected yet coherent associations between nutrients. Our
nutrient-profiling approach combined with a network-based analysis provides a
more unbiased, global view of the relationships between foods and nutrients,
and can be extended towards nutritional policies, food marketing, and
personalized nutrition.Comment: Supplementary material is available at the journal websit
Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS
has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions
at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection
criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined.
For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a
muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the
whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4,
while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The
efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than
90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall
momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The
transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity
for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be
better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions
of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV
The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS
has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions
at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection
criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined.
For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a
muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the
whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4,
while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The
efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than
90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall
momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The
transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity
for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be
better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions
of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
Azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles at high transverse momenta in PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV
The azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles in PbPb collisions at
nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV is measured with the CMS
detector at the LHC over an extended transverse momentum (pt) range up to
approximately 60 GeV. The data cover both the low-pt region associated with
hydrodynamic flow phenomena and the high-pt region where the anisotropies may
reflect the path-length dependence of parton energy loss in the created medium.
The anisotropy parameter (v2) of the particles is extracted by correlating
charged tracks with respect to the event-plane reconstructed by using the
energy deposited in forward-angle calorimeters. For the six bins of collision
centrality studied, spanning the range of 0-60% most-central events, the
observed v2 values are found to first increase with pt, reaching a maximum
around pt = 3 GeV, and then to gradually decrease to almost zero, with the
decline persisting up to at least pt = 40 GeV over the full centrality range
measured.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO
Search for new physics with same-sign isolated dilepton events with jets and missing transverse energy
A search for new physics is performed in events with two same-sign isolated
leptons, hadronic jets, and missing transverse energy in the final state. The
analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of
4.98 inverse femtobarns produced in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of
7 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. This constitutes a factor of
140 increase in integrated luminosity over previously published results. The
observed yields agree with the standard model predictions and thus no evidence
for new physics is found. The observations are used to set upper limits on
possible new physics contributions and to constrain supersymmetric models. To
facilitate the interpretation of the data in a broader range of new physics
scenarios, information on the event selection, detector response, and
efficiencies is provided.Comment: Published in Physical Review Letter
Compressed representation of a partially defined integer function over multiple arguments
In OLAP (OnLine Analitical Processing) data are analysed in an n-dimensional cube. The cube may be represented as a partially defined function over n arguments. Considering that often the function is not defined everywhere, we ask: is there a known way of representing the function or the points in which it is defined, in a more compact manner than the trivial one
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