Control of the sugarcane borers Chilo infuscatellus and Tryporyza nivella by Bactospeine, a microbial pesticide

Chilo infuscatellus and Tryporyza nivella are the important sugarcane borers of Pakistan and are being controlled mostly by chemicals. Microbial control has not been tried in Pakistan. Therefore, grqnules and wettable powder of Bactospeine were tested against sugarcane borers at Mardan. Its granular formulation gave higher control than wettable powder

The co-evolved Helicobacter pylori and gastric cancer: trinity of bacterial virulence, host susceptibility and lifestyle

Helicobacter pylori is an important yet unproven etiological agent of gastric cancer. H. pylori infection is more prevalent in developing Asian countries like India and it is usually acquired at an early age. It has been two decades since Marshall and Warren (1984) first described curved bacilli in the stomach of ulcer and gastritis patients. This discovery has won them the Nobel Prize recently, but the debate whether H. pylori is a pathogen or a commensal organism is still hot. Associations with disease-specific factors remain illusive years after the genome sequences were made available. Cytotoxin-associated antigen A (CagA) and the so-called plasticity region cluster genes are implicated in pathogenesis of the carcinoma of stomach. Another virulence factor VacA whose role is still debatable, has recently been projected in pathology of gastric cancer. Studies of the evolution through genetic variation in H. pylori populations have provided a window into the history of human population migrations and a possible co-evolution of this pathogen with its human host. Possible symbiotic relationships were seriously debated since the discovery of this pathogen. The debate has been further intensified as some studies proposed H. pylori infection to be beneficial in some humans. In this commentary, we attempt to briefly discuss about H. pylori as a human pathogen, and some of the important issues linked to its pathophysiology in different hosts. 'We dance around in a ring and suppose, the secret sits in the middle and knows' – Robert Fros

Anti-Inflammatory Activity of Calotropis gigantea and Tridax procumbens on Carrageenin-Induced Paw Edema in Rats

The anti-inflammatory activities of extract of Calotropis gigantea R.Br. and Tridax procumbens Linn., were assessed on carrageenin-induced paw edema along with standard drug, Ibuprofen. The Ibuprofen significantly reduced paw edema at the dose of 200mg/Kg bw orally. The oral administration equi-effective dose (ED50) of C. gigantea (600mg/Kg bw) and T. procumbens (400 mg/Kg bw) individually revealed about 20-35% more activity than the one rendered by administration of 50mg/Kg bw of Ibuprofen. The effect of C. gigantea and T. procumbens along with various dose regimen of Ibuprofen showed greater anti-inflammatory activities than the Ibuprofen alone

Improved Abdominal Multi-Organ Segmentation via 3D Boundary-Constrained Deep Neural Networks

Quantitative assessment of the abdominal region from clinically acquired CT scans requires the simultaneous segmentation of abdominal organs. Thanks to the availability of high-performance computational resources, deep learning-based methods have resulted in state-of-the-art performance for the segmentation of 3D abdominal CT scans. However, the complex characterization of organs with fuzzy boundaries prevents the deep learning methods from accurately segmenting these anatomical organs. Specifically, the voxels on the boundary of organs are more vulnerable to misprediction due to the highly-varying intensity of inter-organ boundaries. This paper investigates the possibility of improving the abdominal image segmentation performance of the existing 3D encoder-decoder networks by leveraging organ-boundary prediction as a complementary task. To address the problem of abdominal multi-organ segmentation, we train the 3D encoder-decoder network to simultaneously segment the abdominal organs and their corresponding boundaries in CT scans via multi-task learning. The network is trained end-to-end using a loss function that combines two task-specific losses, i.e., complete organ segmentation loss and boundary prediction loss. We explore two different network topologies based on the extent of weights shared between the two tasks within a unified multi-task framework. To evaluate the utilization of complementary boundary prediction task in improving the abdominal multi-organ segmentation, we use three state-of-the-art encoder-decoder networks: 3D UNet, 3D UNet++, and 3D Attention-UNet. The effectiveness of utilizing the organs' boundary information for abdominal multi-organ segmentation is evaluated on two publically available abdominal CT datasets. A maximum relative improvement of 3.5% and 3.6% is observed in Mean Dice Score for Pancreas-CT and BTCV datasets, respectively.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures, journal pape

A review on microcephaly genes

В обзоре обобщены данные последних лет по изучению генов микроцефалии. Обсуждаются результаты молекулярно-генетического исследования этих генов, сделана оценка семи определенных локусов (MCPH1–MCPH7), описаны соответствующие им гены и белковые продукты генов, их вероятная роль в нормальном развитии мозга, а также мутации в этих генах. Ключевые слова: микроцефалия, MCPH локус, MCPH ген, мутация, нейрогенез.В огляді узагальнено дані останніх років з вивчення генів мікроцефалії. Обговорюються результати молекулярно-генетичного дослідження цих генів, зроблено оцінку семи визначених локусів (MCPH1–MCPH7), описано відповідні їм гени і білкові продукти генів, їхня можлива роль у нормальному розвитку мозку, а також мутації у цих генах. Ключові слова: мікроцефалія, локус MCPH, ген MCPH, мутація, нейрогенез.This review aims to summarize the recent findings regarding microcephaly genes. We have discussed the molecular genetics studies of microcephaly genes including a comprehensive appraisal of the seven mapped loci (MCPH1–MCPH7), their corresponding genes and protein products of the genes, their likely role in normal brain development and the details of the mutations reported in these genes. Keywords: microcephaly, MCPH loci, MCPH gene, mutation, neurogenesis

Development of Curriculum Materials for the Students of Family and Community Development in the Colleges of Home Economics of Pakistan

Home Economics Educatio

Lupus anticoagulant in systemic lupus erythematosus and its association with complications

Background: The anti-phospholipid antibody which can occur secondary to SLE have a broad spectrum of both thrombotic and non-thrombotic manifestations. Among the three antiphospholipid antibodies, lupus anticoagulant has the strongest association with antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) and increased chance of recurrence of thrombotic events. Hence early screening of lupus anticoagulant is needed.Methods: 72 clinically diagnosed SLE patients were included. The PT, aPTT were done in all patients. The clotting time is assessed by semi-automated coagulation analyser by using dilute russell viper venom time (dRVV) screen and confirm kits. Lupus anticoagulant was considered to be positive if the screen to confirm ratio is ≥1.2. The patients were followed up for a period of 1 year at regular 3 months interval. The various complications like hemolytic anemia, thrombocytopenia, deep vein thrombosis, cerebrovascular accident/transient ischemic attack (CVA/TIA), myocardial infarction, abortions, pulmonary artery hypertension and lupus nephritis were recorded.Results: Lupus anticoagulant was positive in 38.8% among the study group. The most common thrombotic event observed was DVT (16.7%) followed by MI (11.1%) and CVA/TIA (8.3%). There is significant association between lupus anticoagulant positivity with hemolytic anemia, DVT and pulmonary artery hypertension.Conclusions: The lupus anticoagulant has the strongest association with APS in SLE patients and dRVVT is the test of choice in diagnosing APLA. Early recognition of APLA can reduce the risk of thrombotic complications and can prevent further episodes by giving adequate thromboprophylaxis to lupus anticoagulant positive patients

Clinico-morphological pattern of intracranial tumors in children

Objective: The objective of present study was to observe the histopathological pattern of intracranial tumors in children (\u3c 15 yrs) and to correlate the site of lesion along with the histological diagnosis. Setting: The study included consecutive cases of intracranial tumors diagnosed in children (\u3c 15 yrs.) in the section of histopathology at the Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi during the period of three years. Methods:The initial histological evaluation of these lesions was performed on H and E stained section of paraffin embedded tissue. Special stains and immunohistochemical analysis was done whenever indicated. Results:During the study period, fifty-four cases of intracranial tumors were diagnosed in children. The age ranged from 1-1/2 years to 4 years with male to female ratio of 1.1:1. Astrocytoma comprised 39% of all intracranial tumors of childhood. Medulloblastoma (18.6%) ranked the second most prevalent brain tumor followed by empendymoma (13%), oligodendroglioma 7.5% while non-Hodgkin\u27s lymphoma, primitive neuroblastoma 3.7% and ganglioglioma 3.7% while non-Hodgkin\u27s lymphoma, primitive neuroectodermal tumors, mixed germ cell tumor, pineoblastoma, choroid plexus carcinoma and malignant meningioma constituted 1.8% each. Conculsion: Astrocytoma was the most common pediatric brain tumor. Medulloblastoma was more common in males while pilocytic astrocytoma was more frequent in females. Posterior cranial fossa was the most common site (43.5%) of pediatric brain tumors. Low grade astrocytoma was more prevalent in posterior cranial fossa as compared to high grade astrocytoma which was more frequent in the supratentorial region