Estimation of serum cortisol levels and its correlation with salivary cortisol levels in coronary artery disease patients with and without periodontitis: a cross sectional study

Background: Atherosclerosis refers to combination of changes in the intima of arteries, consisting of focal accumulation of lipids, complex carbohydrates, blood and blood products, fibrous tissue, calcium deposits and associated medical changes. Ischemic heart disease (IHD) refers to a group of closely related syndromes that is caused by an imbalance between myocardial oxygen demand and blood supply.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 63 patients, aged 30-65 years, with known coronary artery disease. Estimation of serum and salivary cortisol levels were assessed with specific ELISA kit for cortisol (R&D Systems) and their comparison was performed in patients with and without periodontitis. Statistical analysis was done using Mann-Whitney U test and Pearson Correlation test.Results: The clinical parameters showed statistically significant association (p<0.001) between coronary artery disease and periodontitis and comparative levels of serum and salivary cortisol displayed varying degrees of positive correlation.Conclusions:Saliva along with serum has great potential as a diagnostic fluid and it showed good correlation with cortisol levels in coronary artery disease patients with and without periodontitis.

Cloning, expression, and isolation of the mannitol transport protein from the thermophilic bacterium Bacillus stearothermophilus

A mannitol phosphotransferase system (PTS) was identified in Bacillus stearothermophilus by in vitro complementation with Escherichia coli EI, HPr, and IIAMtl. Degenerate primers based on regions of high amino acid similarity in the E. coli and Staphylococcus carnosus EIIMtl were used to develop a digoxigenin-labeled probe by PCR. Using this probe, we isolated three overlapping DNA fragments totaling 7.2 kb which contain the genesmtlA,mtlR,mtlF, andmtlD, encoding the mannitol IICB, a regulator, IIA, and a mannitol-1-phosphate dehydrogenase, respectively. The mtlA gene consists of 1,413 bp coding for a 471-amino-acid protein with a calculated mass of 50.1 kDa. The amino acid sequence shows high similarity with the sequence of IICBMtl of S. carnosus and the IICB part of the IICBAMtls of E. coli and B. subtilis. The enzyme could be functionally expressed in E. coli by placing it behind the strong tac promoter. The rate of thermal inactivation at 60&amp;C of B. stearothermophilus IICBMtl expressed in E. coli was two times lower than that of E. coli IICBMtl. IICBMtl in B. stearothermophilus is maximally active at 85&amp;C and thus very thermostable. The enzyme was purified on Ni-nitrilotriacetic acid resin to greater than 95 % purity after six histidines were fused to the C-terminal part of the transporter. Many bacteria transport D-mannitol and other carbohy-drates via a phosphoenolpyruvate (PEP)-dependent phospho

CrysFormer: Protein Structure Prediction via 3d Patterson Maps and Partial Structure Attention

Determining the structure of a protein has been a decades-long open question. A protein's three-dimensional structure often poses nontrivial computation costs, when classical simulation algorithms are utilized. Advances in the transformer neural network architecture -- such as AlphaFold2 -- achieve significant improvements for this problem, by learning from a large dataset of sequence information and corresponding protein structures. Yet, such methods only focus on sequence information; other available prior knowledge, such as protein crystallography and partial structure of amino acids, could be potentially utilized. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first transformer-based model that directly utilizes protein crystallography and partial structure information to predict the electron density maps of proteins. Via two new datasets of peptide fragments (2-residue and 15-residue) , we demonstrate our method, dubbed \texttt{CrysFormer}, can achieve accurate predictions, based on a much smaller dataset size and with reduced computation costs