FORMULATION AND EVALUATION THE NEMATICIDAL ACTIVITY OF CERTAIN PLANT OILS AGAINST CITRUS NEMATODE Tylenculus semi-penetrans

Four plant oils namely Barka, Sesam, Garlic and Almond were prepared as emulsifiable concentrate (EC). Polyethylene glycol 600 dioleate (PEG 600 DO), Toximol R and Toximol H were used as emulsifiers while xylene and toluene used as solvents. Four formulations only passed successfully (F1, D2, C3 and E5) in thePhysico-chemical properties according to the standards of WHO. The results indicated that the successful prepared formulations showed different degrees of effectiveness against second stage juveniles of Tylenculus semipenetrans under laboratory conditions. Second stage juveniles seem as paralyze at 24 hrs, whereas this effect disappears completely after 72 hrs in case of Almond and Barka. On the other hand, the effect of Sesam and Garlic showed a slight effect at 24 hrs and increased gradually to give highly effectiveness after 72 hours. According to EC50 values at 72 hrs, Garlic was more effective than Sesam. The respective EC50 values were 0.6 and 2 mg/ml. These results emphasized the promising effect of certain plant oil formulations including Garlic and Sesam oil against pathogenic nematode, and that such formulation might be used for nematode control in small areas, as gardens and plant nursery

Which method is best for the induction of labour?: A systematic review, network meta-analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis

Background: More than 150,000 pregnant women in England and Wales have their labour induced each year. Multiple pharmacological, mechanical and complementary methods are available to induce labour. Objective: To assess the relative effectiveness, safety and cost-effectiveness of labour induction methods and, data permitting, effects in different clinical subgroups. Methods: We carried out a systematic review using Cochrane methods. The Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group’s Trials Register was searched (March 2014). This contains over 22,000 reports of controlled trials (published from 1923 onwards) retrieved from weekly searches of OVID MEDLINE (1966 to current); Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (The Cochrane Library); EMBASE (1982 to current); Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (1984 to current); ClinicalTrials.gov; the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Portal; and hand-searching of relevant conference proceedings and journals. We included randomised controlled trials examining interventions to induce labour compared with placebo, no treatment or other interventions in women eligible for third-trimester induction. We included outcomes relating to efficacy, safety and acceptability to women. In addition, for the economic analysis we searched the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, and Economic Evaluations Databases, NHS Economic Evaluation Database and the Health Technology Assessment database. We carried out a network meta-analysis (NMA) using all of the available evidence, both direct and indirect, to produce estimates of the relative effects of each treatment compared with others in a network. We developed a de novo decision tree model to estimate the cost-effectiveness of various methods. The costs included were the intervention and other hospital costs incurred (price year 2012–13). We reviewed the literature to identify preference-based utilities for the health-related outcomes in the model. We calculated incremental cost-effectiveness ratios, expected costs, utilities and net benefit. We represent uncertainty in the optimal intervention using cost-effectiveness acceptability curves. Results: We identified 1190 studies; 611 were eligible for inclusion. The interventions most likely to achieve vaginal delivery (VD) within 24 hours were intravenous oxytocin with amniotomy [posterior rank 2; 95% credible intervals (CrIs) 1 to 9] and higher-dose (≥ 50 μg) vaginal misoprostol (rank 3; 95% CrI 1 to 6). Compared with placebo, several treatments reduced the odds of caesarean section, but we observed considerable uncertainty in treatment rankings. For uterine hyperstimulation, double-balloon catheter had the highest probability of being among the best three treatments, whereas vaginal misoprostol (≥ 50 μg) was most likely to increase the odds of excessive uterine activity. For other safety outcomes there were insufficient data or there was too much uncertainty to identify which treatments performed ‘best’. Few studies collected information on women’s views. Owing to incomplete reporting of the VD within 24 hours outcome, the cost-effectiveness analysis could compare only 20 interventions. The analysis suggested that most interventions have similar utility and differ mainly in cost. With a caveat of considerable uncertainty, titrated (low-dose) misoprostol solution and buccal/sublingual misoprostol had the highest likelihood of being cost-effective. Limitations: There was considerable uncertainty in findings and there were insufficient data for some planned subgroup analyses. Conclusions: Overall, misoprostol and oxytocin with amniotomy (for women with favourable cervix) is more successful than other agents in achieving VD within 24 hours. The ranking according to safety of different methods was less clear. The cost-effectiveness analysis suggested that titrated (low-dose) oral misoprostol solution resulted in the highest utility, whereas buccal/sublingual misoprostol had the lowest cost. There was a high degree of uncertainty as to the most cost-effective intervention

Flexural Behavior of One-Way Slabs Reinforced with Welded Wire Mesh under Vertical Loads

This paper aims to study the behavior of one-way concrete solid slabs reinforced with welded wire mesh to investigate the efficiency of using welded wire mesh in the construction of structural slabs as a replacement for ordinary steel bars. This research included experimental and analytical programs. Nine 700×1050 mm one-way simple specimens and six 525×1050 mm continuous one-way slabs with two equal spans were tested under point, line, and uniform static loads. The experimental program studied the use of welded mesh and the number of layers utilized. Numerical analysis was conducted using finite element modeling developed using the ABAQUS 6.13 software package. Experimental and analytical results showed good correlation: the number of layers of welded metal mesh and load type significantly affected the peak vertical load capacity of simple and continuous slabs, with slabs showing higher values with welded mesh than those of ordinary reinforcing bars. In addition, using welded metal mesh to reinforce solid slabs enhanced their cracking behavior as well as their ductility. Doi: 10.28991/CEJ-2022-08-04-03 Full Text: PD

Drug repositioning framework using embedding drug-protein-disease similarities with graph convolution network and ensemble learning

The benefits of drug repositioning to the pharmaceutical industry have garnered significant attention in the field of drug development in recent years. Deep learning techniques have significantly improved drug repositioning by studying therapeutic drug profiles, diseases, and proteins. As the number of drugs increases, their targets and interactions generate imbalanced data, which may be undesirable as input to computational prediction model. The approach proposed in this paper uses a hierarchical network embedding technique and a graph autoencoder (GAE) scheme to solve this problem. The approach extracts embedding feature vectors of drugs and targets from a heterogeneous multi-source network to predict unknown drug-target interactions (DTIs). We employ a Meta-Path instance that has extensive drug and target characteristic data. The effectiveness of utilizing Meta-Path instance, the number of attention heads, and Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and ensemble learning algorithm is analyzed on gold-standard datasets to evaluate the accuracy of the model and validity of the discovered DTI. The results achieved by our model using 10-fold cross-validation testing showed an improvement of 2.52 % in prediction accuracy, 4.2 % in recall, 3.94 % in AUC, and 3.6 % in F-score compared to state-of-the-art methods

Figs. 10–11. 10 in First Record of a Handsome Fungus Beetle (Coleoptera: Endomychidae) from the Arabian Peninsula

Figs. 10–11. 10) Location of Gabal Shada Alalaa Nature Reserve in Saudi Arabia; 11) Habitat of Ancylopus melanocephalus with Acacia gerrardii in southwestern Saudi Arabia.Published as part of <i>Torkey, Ashraf M. El & Dhafer, Hathal M. Al, 2015, First Record of a Handsome Fungus Beetle (Coleoptera: Endomychidae) from the Arabian Peninsula, pp. 824-827 in The Coleopterists Bulletin 69 (4)</i> on page 826, DOI: 10.1649/0010-065x-69.4.824, <a href="http://zenodo.org/record/10114075">http://zenodo.org/record/10114075</a&gt