Grape Seed and Skin Extract Mitigates High Dosage Garlic-Induced Oxidative Stress in Rat Heart

Garlic is a commonly used spice in folk medicine which could exert adverse health effects when given at high dose. Grape seed and skin extract (GSSE) exhibits a variety of beneficial effects even at high dose. In the present study we evaluated the toxicity of high garlic dose treatment on heart and the protective effect of GSSE. Rats were intraperitoneally (IP) administered either with garlic extract (5 g/kg bw) or GSSE (500 mg/kg bw) or a combination of garlic and GSSE at the same doses daily for one month. Data showed that high garlic dose induced heart toxicity and a pro-oxidative status characterized by increased MDA, NO, carbonyl protein, LDH, H2O2, free iron, and calcium. Unexpectedly garlic increased catalase and peroxidase but had no effect on superoxide dismutase. GSSE alone or in co-treatment with garlic had an opposite role and counteracted almost all garlic-induced deleterious effects to near control level. In conclusion, high garlic dose induced a pro-oxidative state into heart via the Fenton reaction between H2O2 and free iron, and GSSE exerted antioxidant properties

Partitioning clustering algorithms for protein sequence data sets

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genome-sequencing projects are currently producing an enormous amount of new sequences and cause the rapid increasing of protein sequence databases. The unsupervised classification of these data into functional groups or families, clustering, has become one of the principal research objectives in structural and functional genomics. Computer programs to automatically and accurately classify sequences into families become a necessity. A significant number of methods have addressed the clustering of protein sequences and most of them can be categorized in three major groups: hierarchical, graph-based and partitioning methods. Among the various sequence clustering methods in literature, hierarchical and graph-based approaches have been widely used. Although partitioning clustering techniques are extremely used in other fields, few applications have been found in the field of protein sequence clustering. It is not fully demonstrated if partitioning methods can be applied to protein sequence data and if these methods can be efficient compared to the published clustering methods.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We developed four partitioning clustering approaches using Smith-Waterman local-alignment algorithm to determine pair-wise similarities of sequences. Four different sets of protein sequences were used as evaluation data sets for the proposed methods.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We show that these methods outperform several other published clustering methods in terms of correctly predicting a classifier and especially in terms of the correctness of the provided prediction. The software is available to academic users from the authors upon request.</p

Effect of garlic’s mode of administration on erythrocytes and plasma parameters in Wistar rat

Garlic preparations are recognized as hypolipidemic, cardioprotective and antihypertensive agents. However, there are some discrepancies about the beneficial effects of garlic according to dosage and mode of administration. We aimed to determine the ability of high dosage garlic (5 g/kg bw) to modulate erythrocytes and plasma parameters when administered orally (p.o.) or via intraperitoneal (i.p.) route. With regard to erythrocytes parameters, p.o. garlic treatment was found to have beneficial effects as it increased hemoglobin and hematocrit levels. Garlic i.p. treatment showed detrimental activity as it decreased these parameters. Our results reveal that garlic administered by p.o. does not involve any significant variation on mean cell volume (MCV), mean cell hemoglobin (MCH) and mean cell hemoglobin concentration (MCHC). Nevertheless, garlic i.p. increased MCV but reduced the MCH. The MCHC remained invariable even in intraperitoneal way. Concerning plasma parameters, our data show that garlic did not induce any variation on glycaemia and plasma electrolytes whatever its mode of administration. High garlic dosage was found to be relatively safe when administered orally.Keywords: Garlic, erythrocytes, hemoglobin, hematocrit, glycaemia, plasmatic electrolytes, administration mod