Intracellular Lipid Homeostasis and Trafficking in Autophagy

In eukaryotes, lipids are not only an important constituent of the plasma membrane but also used to generate specialized membrane-bound organelles, including temporary compartments with critical functions. As such, lipids play a key role in intracellular homeostasis—the ability of a cell to maintain stable internal conditions upon changes in its extracellular environment. Autophagy, one of the cellular processes through which eukaryotic cells strive for survival under stress, is heavily dependent on lipid and membrane trafficking through the de novo formation of autophagosomes—temporary, large, and double-bilayered organelles in which materials are encapsulated for recycling. This chapter discusses what we know about lipid homeostasis and trafficking during autophagy and autophagosome formation and comments on future directions of the field

Recent development in the strategies projected for chikungunya vaccine in humans

The unprecedented epidemic spread of chikungunya worldwide illustrates the critical need for potent vaccines and therapeutic interventions. The morbidity and mortality associated with this arboviral infection has become a major public health problem in many countries across different continents. Increasing public–private partnerships have opened new avenues in research and development of vaccines. This review mainly focuses on the recent advances in patented approaches for chikungunya vaccine development and the forthcoming challenges

Adverse drug reaction profile of anticancer agents in a tertiary care centre of rural Maharashtra: a cross-sectional study

Background: The present study was undertaken to analyse the clinical spectrum, pattern of ADR reported, most common suspected drugs, timing of reporting of suspected ADR, outcome, severity and causality assessment of adverse drug reactions among oncology patients reported at our ADR monitoring Centre. Methods: The descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out for two months in the oncology department of a tertiary care rural hospital. ADR reporting form Version 2.4 was used for recording information of all patients of any gender and age who were suspected cases of adverse drug reactions receiving chemotherapy. Results: Total 83 ADRs were reported within the duration of two months. The number of males and females were 21 and 62, respectively with mean age 56.9±11.6 years for males and 59.6±8.8 years for females. The age group most commonly reported with suspected ADR was 61-70 years (28.9%). Of the 83 ADR reported, the most common suspected drug was Paclitaxel (47, 56.6%). The most common indications for the use of these anticancer drugs was reported to be CA breast (43, 51.8%). Most of the ADRs (38, 45.8%) were reported immediately. On applying Naranjo’s Causality Assessment Scale, 61 and 22 ADRs fell in the category of Probable and Possible, respectively. Conclusions: The occurrence of ADR among patients on chemotherapy is high. The reported ADR were common and predictable. Hence diligent monitoring in ADR may help manage and prevent morbidity associated with anti-cancer drugs

IndicXTREME: A Multi-Task Benchmark For Evaluating Indic Languages

In this work, we introduce IndicXTREME, a benchmark consisting of nine diverse tasks covering 18 languages from the Indic sub-continent belonging to four different families. Across languages and tasks, IndicXTREME contains a total of 103 evaluation sets, of which 51 are new contributions to the literature. To maintain high quality, we only use human annotators to curate or translate our datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort toward creating a standard benchmark for Indic languages that aims to test the zero-shot capabilities of pretrained language models. We also release IndicCorp v2, an updated and much larger version of IndicCorp that contains 20.9 billion tokens in 24 languages. We pretrain IndicBERT v2 on IndicCorp v2 and evaluate it on IndicXTREME to show that it outperforms existing multilingual language models such as XLM-R and MuRIL

AuthN-AuthZ: Integrated, User-Friendly and Privacy-Preserving Authentication and Authorization

In this paper, we propose a novel, privacy-preserving, and integrated authentication and authorization scheme (dubbed as AuthN-AuthZ). The proposed scheme can address both the usability and privacy issues often posed by authentication through use of privacy-preserving Biometric-Capsule-based authentication. Each Biometric-Capsule encapsulates a user's biometric template as well as their role within a hierarchical Role-based Access Control model. As a result, AuthN-AuthZ provides novel efficiency by performing both authentication and authorization simultaneously in a single operation. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme's integrated AuthN-AuthZ operation is the first of its kind. The proposed scheme is flexible in design and allows for the secure use of robust deep learning techniques, such as the recently proposed and current state-of-the-art facial feature representation method, ArcFace. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed scheme and its AuthN-AuthZ operation