Effect of polyunsaturated fatty acids on drug-sensitive and resistant tumor cells in vitro

Previous studies showed that γ-linolenic acid (GLA, 18: 3 ω-6), arachidonic acid (AA, 20:4 ω -6), eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA, 20: 5 ω -3) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22:6 ω -3) have selective tumoricidal action. In the present study, it was observed that dihomo-gamma-linolenic acid (DGLA) and AA, EPA and DHA have cytotoxic action on both vincristine-sensitive (KB-3-1) and resistant (KB-ChR-8-5) cancer cells in vitro that appeared to be a free-radical dependent process but not due to the formation of prostaglandins, leukotrienes and thromboxanes. Uptake of vincristine and fatty acids was higher while their efflux was lower in KB-3-1 cells compared with KB-ChR-8-5 cells, suggesting that drug resistant cells have an effective efflux pump. GLA, DGLA, AA, EPA and DHA enhanced the uptake and decreased efflux in both drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cells and augmented the susceptibility of tumor cells especially, of drug-resistant cells to the cytotoxic action of vincristine. These results suggest that certain polyunsaturated fatty acids have tumoricidal action and are capable of enhancing the cytotoxic action of anti-cancer drugs specifically, on drug-resistant cells by enhancing drug uptake and reducing its efflux. Thus, polyunsaturated fatty acids either by themselves or in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs have the potential as anti-cancer molecules

Nanoencapsulation of Pesticides: Sustainable Perspective in Agriculture

The concern towards the increasing challenges of sustainable agriculture made the researchers towards significant technological development and innovations in recent years. In particular, Nanotechnology offers potential solutions to improve agricultural production assuring sustainability. The incorporation of nanotechnology as a means of nano pesticides delivers the pesticides appropriately i.e., targeted delivery of pesticides by lowering the indiscriminate use of conventional pesticides. The assets of a nanoencapsulated pesticide formulation are controlled releasing properties with enhanced solubility, specificity, permeability and stability. They provide in-built switches to control the release and subsequent availability of pesticides to be used effectively over a given period of time and their design enables them to resist the severe environmental processes such as leaching, evaporation, photolytic hydrolytic and microbial degradation over conventional pesticides. This review provides fundamental information to critically assess the significant role of nanotechnology for the encapsulation of pesticides. © 2020 Author(s)

A clinico-histopathological review of ovarian masses at a tertiary care centre

Background: Ovarian tumours can be seen at all stages of life but they differ in type, being mostly germ cell tumours in childhood, functional cysts in the reproductive age group (up to 45 years) and becoming increasingly malignant towards and after menopause. It also accounts for most prevalent cause of hospital admissions.Methods: This is a retrospective study conducted in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at a tertiary care hospital in Mumbai from August 2017 to August 2018. All patients with ovarian masses who were surgically managed were included in the study. The data of 30 patients was collected in excel sheet and analyzed by descriptive statistics.Results: Out of the 30 ovarian masses, 50 % were functional cysts, 46.6% were benign ovarian masses and 3.3% were borderline malignant. 46% of tumours were seen in the age group 21-30 years. More than 50 % tumours were seen in parous women. Most common presenting clinical symptom was pain in abdomen irrespective of the type of tumour. Most common complication was haemorrhage in the cyst. Laparoscopy was done in 4 patients and 26 required exploratory laparotomy. Most common surgery performed was unilateral cystectomy for functional ovarian cysts and benign ovarian tumours. Mucinous cystadenoma was the most common benign ovarian tumour, followed by dermoid cyst.Conclusions: Pre-operative diagnostic approach to a patient with ovarian mass includes careful history taking, thorough clinical examination, ultrasound and tumour marker assays in selected cases. Conservative surgery should be the goal to preserve fertility in young patients with ovarian tumours

A study of fetomaternal outcomes in cases of jaundice at a tertiary care centre

Background: Jaundice in pregnancy is affects a small percentage of pregnant women yet takes a major toll on the health of both the mother and the foetus. The distribution of jaundice in pregnancy varies throughout the world but is seen comparatively more in the developing countries. The course and outcome of liver disorders in pregnancy is altered due to the various hemodynamic, immunological and hormonal changes of pregnancy.Methods: This is a retrospective study conducted in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Seth G.S. medical college and KEM hospital, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India over one year from January to December 2015. Data of 55 women diagnosed to have jaundice from clinical and biochemical evidences as per records was collected.Results: There were 6780 deliveries; the incidence of jaundice being 0.81%. Most common cause identified was viral hepatitis 34 cases (62%), 24 cases being hepatitis E, followed by cholestasis of pregnancy 13 cases (23.6%) and the rest 8 cases were due to other causes like leptospirosis, malaria, HELLP syndrome, drug induced and chronic liver disease due to portal hypertension.72.7% belonged from the rural set up. 45 patients were referred from peripheral hospitals. Maximum patients were primigravidas and were between the age group 25-29 years of age. 70% babies were low birth weight. 50% babies had intrauterine growth restriction. There were 12 maternal deaths,7 due to hepatitis E. Total vaginal deliveries were 37, 9 patients underwent lower segment caesarean section and 1 patient had instrumental (vacuum) delivery. Most common maternal complication was DIC and postpartum haemorrhage. 18 patients required ICU care, out of which 13 patients were Hepatitis E positive. Ventilator support was required in 73% of the patients admitted to the intensive care unit.Conclusions: Prompt diagnosis, accurate evaluation and a multidisciplinary approach is needed to tackle this high risk pregnancy as it leads to a poor maternal and perinatal outcome

RP-HPLC METHOD FOR SIMULTANEOUS ESTIMATION OF RITONAVIR, OMBITASVIR AND PARITAPREVIR IN TABLET DOSAGE FORMS AND THEIR STRESS DEGRADATION STUDIES

Objective: The objective of the present study was to develop and validate a novel reverse phase high performance liquid chromatographic (RP-HPLC) method, for simultaneous determination of ritonavir (RIT), ombitasvir (OMB) and paritaprevir (PAR) in bulk mixtures, and in tablets. Methods: Determination of the drugs ritonavir (RIT), ombitasvir (OMB), and paritaprevir (PAR), was carried out applying Hypersil BDS C18 column (250 mm X 4.6 mm i.e., 5 µm particle size), with photodiode array detector at λmax of 254 nm. The mobile phase applied for the current study composed of two solvents, i.e. A (0.01N % w/v potassium di-hydrogen orthophosphate buffer, pH 3.0 adjusted with dilute orthophosphoric acid) and B (acetonitrile). The mobile phase was pumped at a flow rate of 1.0 ml/min in the isocratic mode. The validation study with respect to specificity, linearity, precision, accuracy, and robustness, limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) was carried out employing the ICH guidelines. Results: Ritonavir, ombitasvir, and paritaprevir showed linearity of response between 12.5-75 μg/ml for ritonavir, 3.125-18.75 µg/ml for ombitasvir and 18.75–112.5 µg/ml for paritaprevir, with a correlation coefficient (R2) 0.999, 0.999,0.999 for RIT, OMB, and PAR respectively. The % recovery obtained was 99.82±0.14 % RIT, OMB 100.03±0.96 % and for 99.96±0.26 % PAR. The LOD and LOQ values for RIT, OMB, PAR were obtained to be 0.02, 0.019and0.02, µg/ml and 0.07, 0.06 and 0.07 µg/ml, respectively. The method also exhibits good robustness for different chromatographic conditions like wavelength, flow rate, mobile phase, and injection volume. Conclusion: The method was successfully employed, for the quantification of RIT, OMB, and PAR, in the quality control of in-house developed tablets, and can be applied for the industrial use

Improving recognition accuracy on CVSD speech under mismatched conditions

Emerging technology in mobile communications is seeing increasingly high acceptance as a preferred choice for last-mile communication. There have been a wide range of techniques to achieve signal compression to suit to the smaller bandwidths available on mobile communication channels; but speech recognition methods have seen success mostly only in controlled speech environments. However, designing of speech recognition systems for mobile communications is crucial in order to provide voice enabled command and control and for applications like Mobile Voice Commerce. Continuously Variable Slope Delta (CVSD) modulation, a technique for low bitrate coding of speech, has been in use particularly in military wireless environments for over 30 years, and is now also adopted by BlueTooth. CVSD is particularly suitable for Internet and mobile environments due to its robustness against transmission errors, and simplicity of implementation and the absence of a need for synchronization. In this paper, we study some characteristics of the CVSD speech in the context of robust recognition of compressed speech, and present two methods of improving the recognition accuracy in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. We study the characteristics of the features extracted for ASR and how they relate to the corresponding features computed from Pulse Coded Modulation (PCM) speech and apply this relation to correct the CVSD features to improve recognition accuracy. Secondly we show that the ASR done on bit-streams directly, gives a good recognition accuracy and when combined with our approach gives a better accuracy

IN VITRO EVALUATION OF CYTOTOXIC AND GENOTOXIC EFFECTS OF PLANT EXTRACTS FROM NOTHAPODYTES FOETIDA (WIGHT) SLEUMER (FAMILY: ICACINACEAE)

Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate cytotoxic and genotoxic properties of aqueous and methanolic extracts of the aerial parts of Nothapodytes foetida (Wight) Sleumer plant.Methods: The cytotoxic effects of aqueous and methanol extract of leaves and stem bark on cell viability of HeLa, MCF7, and HCT-15 cell lines was determined by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazoliumbromide assay. We also confirmed the genotoxic effects of plant extracts through DNA fragmentation in cancer cells and expression pattern of apoptotic genes including p53 and caspase-3 analyzed by semiquantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and western blotting techniques.Results: The present study revealed that, when plant extract was tested for cytotoxic activity, the data obtained from cell viability results of HeLa and MCF7 cells revealed that methanol extract of leaves and stem bark exhibited a range of significant cytotoxic activities in a dose-dependent manner varying from 2.5 to 25 μg/mL, whereas an aqueous extract of leaves and stem bark showed decreased cell viability with an increase in the concentration of both the extracts from 5 to 50 μg/mL.Conclusion: These results indicated that the crude extract aerial parts of N. foetida plant contain promising substances having a potential as cytotoxic agent

Conservative management of a complex ovarian cyst in a case of Glanzmann’s thrombasthenia

Complex ovarian cyst has many causes one of them being haemorrhagic cyst. Most of the haemorrhagic ovarian cyst present as an emergency, detailed clinical history is important before deciding the management. Reporting an interesting case of conservative management in a young patient of reproductive age group with variant Glanzmann’s Thrombasthenia which led to a very large ovarian haemorrhagic cyst and presented as a case of torsion of the ovarian cyst. This case highlights the importance of thorough history taking and evaluation prior to embarking on surgical interference in such cases of coagulation disorders. Glanzmann's thrombasthenia (GT) is a genetic disorder which is characterized by a defect in platelet aggregation resulting in bleeding due to absence or dysfunction of the platelet glycoprotein IIb/IIIa complex. It is a rare genetic disorder that follows autosomal recessive type of inheritance

Transmembrane helix prediction using amino acid property features and latent semantic analysis

Prediction of transmembrane (TM) helices by statistical methods suffers from lack of sufficient training data. Current best methods use hundreds or even thousands of free parameters in their models which are tuned to fit the little data available for training. Further, they are often restricted to the generally accepted topology "cytoplasmic-transmembrane-extracellular" and cannot adapt to membrane proteins that do not conform to this topology. Recent crystal structures of channel proteins have revealed novel architectures showing that the above topology may not be as universal as previously believed. Thus, there is a need for methods that can better predict TM helices even in novel topologies and families

A REVIEW ON MATRIX ASSISTED LASER DESORPTION/INOZATION MASS SPECTROSCOPY

ABSTRACTMatrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectroscopy (MALDI-MS) is the most important technique of MS to analyze polymer systems. It isa special case of MS using specific sample preparation methods and low fluence laser desorption to create the analyte ions. This technique is basedupon an ultraviolet absorbing matrix. The matrix and the polymer are mixed at a molecular level in an appropriate solvent. The solvent helps preventaggregation of the polymer. The sample matrix mixture is placed on the sample probe tip, under vacuum conditions; the solvent is removed, leaving cocrystallizedpolymer molecules homogenously dispersed within matrix molecules. When the pulsed laser beam is tuned to the appropriate frequency,the energy is transferred to the matrix which is partially vaporized, carrying intact polymer into the vapor phase and charging the polymer chains inthe linear time of flight (TOF) analyzer. This review includes the detailed information of MALDI-MS, MALDI-TOF.Keywords: Matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectroscopy, Principle, Sample preparation techniques, Matrix assisted laser desorptionionization - time of flight, Matrix assisted laser desorption ionization - mass spectrometric imaging, Applications