Effect of high-fat diet-induced obesity on thyroid gland structure in female rats and the possible ameliorating effect of metformin therapy

Background: Obesity is known to induce a state of lipotoxicity that affects the different organs of the body. Metformin is an antidiabetic drug commonly used in obesity treatment. It was known to improve thyroid function and its regulating hormones. Structural changes in the thyroid gland associated with obesity have not been well investigated. So, the aim of the present study is to detect structural changes in thyroid gland induced by obesity and to investigate the possible protective role of metformin therapy. Materials and methods: Thirty adult female albino rats were divided into three groups (10 rats each). Group I (control group), group II (rats fed with a high-fat diet), and group III (rats fed with a high-fat diet and treated with metformin therapy). After 12 weeks, rats from all groups were sacrificed. Blood samples were taken for measurement of lipid profile, thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), free T3 and free T4. Thyroid glands were extracted and processed for histological and ultrastructural study. Morphometric measurements for the colloid area of thyroid follicles and height of the follicular cells were done. Results: Group I displayed normal biochemical parameters and architecture of the thyroid gland. Group II revealed disordered lipid profile, high TSH, free T3 and T4. Microscopically, large thyroid follicles with excessive colloid accumulation and decreased follicular cells height were seen. Some follicular cells showed pyknotic nuclei, vacuolated cytoplasm and disrupted basement membrane with mast cell infiltration of the thyroid tissue. Ultrastructurally, group II follicular cells showed loss of apical microvilli, dense shrunken nuclei, dilated endoplasmic reticulum, swollen damaged mitochondria with large intracellular vacuoles and colloid droplets. In group III, the biochemical parameters and structure of thyroid follicles were improved, and they had a near-normal appearance. Conclusions: Obesity induced by high-fat diet in female rats structurally and functionally changed the thyroid gland in a way that may explain hypothyroidism associated with obesity. These changes were improved by metformin therapy

New types of generalizations of θ-closed sets

The aim of this paper is to introduce and study the class of T-closed sets as a generalization of θ-closed sets, which is properly placed between θ-closed sets and closed sets. A generalization of T-closed sets, namely, generalized T-closed sets is introduced and studied, which is properly placed between T-closed sets and g-closed sets

DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A STABILITY-INDICATING RP-HPLC METHOD FOR THE DETERMINATION OF XIPAMIDE IN PURE AND DOSAGE FORMS

Objective: A simple, selective, precise and stability-indicating RP-HPLC-method was developed and validated for the determination of xipamide (XIP).Methods: Stability tests were done through exposure of the analyte solution to thermal, photolytic, hydrolytic and oxidative stress conditions. The chromatographic separation was carried out in less than five min on a RP stainless-steel C-18 analytical column (150 mm ×4.6 mm ID, 5 µm) with an isocratic elution system of 0.023 M orthophosphoric acid of pH 2.6 and acetonitrile as the mobile phase in the ratio of 60: 40 at 1.5 ml/min flow rate at room temperature. A diode array UV was used at 220 nm for detection.Results: The degradation products were well separated from the pure drug. The elution time of XIP was found to be 4.561±0.024 min. The method was validated in terms of linearity, accuracy, precision, limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ) and robustness. Good linearity was found in the concentration range of 1–100 µg/ml with a correlation coefficient of 0.9999. Intraday and interday precision were within 1.4%. LOD and LOQ were 0.088 μg/ml and 0.267 μg/ml, respectively and percentage recovery of XIP was found to be 99.92±1.02 %. Conclusion: The proposed method was successfully applied to the determination of XIP in pure form and in its pharmaceutical preparation without interference from its degradation products.Keywords: Xipamide, Stability indicating RP-HPLC, Stress degradation, Pure form, Dosage form

Morphological and molecular characterization of L-methioninase producing Aspergillus species

Six species of L-methioninase producing Aspergillus species, isolated from Egyptian soil, were selected for comprehensive morphotypic and molecular characterization. Based on morphological and physiological features, these isolates were identified as Aspergillus flavipes, Aspergillus carneus, Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus tamari, Aspergillus oryzae, and Aspergillus parasiticus. Regarding to the maximum enzyme productivity by A. flavipes, it was selected as authentic strain for ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA) primer design. Using primer combinations for 18S rRNA and internal transcribed spacers (ITS)1 amplification, these isolates gave the same polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplicon size, revealing the relative molecular identity. Moreover, using ITS2 primers, among the six isolates, Aspergillus flavipes EK and A. carneus displayed PCR products on agarose gel, approving the actual morphological and biochemical similarities of these two isolates, A. flavipes group. By sequencing of ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 region, blasting and alignment from the data base, A. flavipes EK showed a typical identity to gene bank deposited A. flavipes isolates. The rRNA sequence of A. flavipes EK was deposited to genbank under accession number JF831014.Key words: Aspergillus, morphological descriptions, 18 S rRNA, internal transcribed spacers (ITS) regions

Comparative Study between the Performances of Nile Tilapia Oreochromisniloticus during and Out of the Normal Spawning Season

During the production season (2010-2011), this work was carried out at a commercial tilapia hatchery in Motobas, Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate- Egypt. Two experiments were managed using the same design to make a comparison between spawning of Nile tilapia Oreochromisniloticusbroodstock off-season (the winter) and on-season (the summer). The two experiments were tested by studying the effects of using feed additive (Nuvisol hatch P® 0.1%), different broodstocksizes (350, 200, 150 and mixed up to 250 g/fish) and stocking densities (50, 55, 60 female/pond-24m2) on growth performance, feed utilization, reproductive performance and economical profitability parameters of Nile tilapia, O.niloticus spawned in the summer and in the winter. Comparing the results of the economic analysis of the two experiments showed that the total production of Nile tilapia fry per each spawning pond, 24 square meters, is 28,090 within the natural spawning season, an increase of 2.23% from that was spawning outside the normal season (27478 fry). Though total revenue and net income under hatchery conditions in the out off-season (February 2010) much higher than that in natural spawning season (April 2011) by 22.01%. This is of course due to the price of tilapia fry in the winter months is higher than the summer to supply shortages in winter and increased demand at the same time. This is due to the farmers need to start the growing season early, March/April, in order to harvest their fish before temperatures drop in the next winter, which adversely affect the life of the fish

Advanced Guided Whale Optimization Algorithm for Feature Selection in BlazePose Action Recognition

The BlazePose, which models human body skeletons as spatiotemporal graphs, has achieved fantastic performance in skeleton-based action identification. Skeleton extraction from photos for mobile devices has been made possible by the BlazePose system. A Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN) can then forecast the actions. The Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN) can be improved by simply replacing the skeleton input data with a different set of joints that provide more information about the activity of interest. On the other hand, existing approaches require the user to manually set the graph’s topology and then fix it across all input layers and samples. This research shows how to use the Statistical Fractal Search (SFS)-Guided whale optimization algorithm (GWOA). To get the best solution for the GWOA, we adopt the SFS diffusion algorithm, which uses the random walk with a Gaussian distribution method common to growing systems. Continuous values are transformed into binary to apply to the feature-selection problem in conjunction with the BlazePose skeletal topology and stochastic fractal search to construct a novel implementation of the BlazePose topology for action recognition. In our experiments, we employed the Kinetics and the NTU-RGB+D datasets. The achieved actiona accuracy in the X-View is 93.14% and in the X-Sub is 96.74%. In addition, the proposed model performs better in numerous statistical tests such as the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Wilcoxon signed-rank test, histogram, and times analysis

Multi-level Multi-objective Quadratic Fractional Programming Problem with Fuzzy Parameters: A FGP Approach

The motivation behind this paper is to present multi-level multi-objective quadratic fractional programming (ML-MOQFP) problem with fuzzy parameters in the constraints. ML-MOQFP problem is an important class of non-linear fractional programming problem. These type of problems arise in many fields such as production planning, financial and corporative planning, health care and hospital planning. Firstly, the concept of the -cut and fuzzy partial order relation are applied to transform the set of fuzzy constraints into a common crisp set. Then, the quadratic fractional objective functions in each level are transformed into non-linear objective functions based on a proposed transformation. Secondly, in the proposed model, separate non-linear membership functions for each objective function of the ML-MOQFP problem are defined. Then, the fuzzy goal programming (FGP) approach is utilized to obtain a compromise solution for the ML-MOQFP problem by minimizing the sum of the negative deviational variables. Finally, an illustrative numerical example is given to demonstrate the applicability and performance of the proposed approach