Antiinflammatory activity of Albizia lebbeck (L.) BENTH

Albizia lebbeck (L.) BENTH (Fabaceae), popularly known as Sirisha, is employed in Indian folk medicine for the treatment of boils, cough, pain, swelling and it is also used against diarrhea. The anti-inflammatory activity was assessed using acute and subacute models of inflammation in rats. These studies demonstrated that oral administration of ethyl acetate extract of Albizia lebbeck (EAL) (100, 200, 400 mg/kg) exhibited significant anti-inflammatory activity. In acute inflammation as produced by carrageenan 62.19% after 5h, by histamine 43.19%, by dextran 45.29%, by serotonin 68.84 while in subacute anti-inflammatory model using formaldehyde-induced hind paw edema (after 5 h) 31.5% and cotton pellets 13.48% protection from inflammation was observed at 400 mg/kg orally dose of EAL. EAL neither show ulcerogenic effect at different doses of EAL nor show any sign of toxicity and mortality up to a dose level of 5000 mg/kg, p.o. in rats & mice. These data indicate that EAL possesses significant anti- anti-inflammatory activity. Keywords: Acute toxicity, Anti-inflammatory, Albizia lebbeck

Pharmacognostical standardization of Albizia lebbeck (L.) BENTH (Fabaceae)

Albizia lebbeck (L.) BENTH (Fabaceae), commonly known as Sirisha, traditionally used as astringent, to treat boils, cough, pain, swelling and it is also used against diarrhea. In the present investigation, various pharmacognostical standards for A. lebbeck have been established. Collection of plant material was carried out and its morphological, physico-chemical and phytochemical studies including HPTLC of leaf, root and stem of plant were investigated. Microscopically, leaf of A. lebbeck showed presence of anomocytic stomata, arc shaped and cortical parenchyma. The roots of the plant showed cork cambium, secondary phloem, and calcium oxalate crystals and stem exhibited fibres, parenchyma cells, vessels, stomata, palisade cells and trichomes. Phytochemically, the ethyl acetate and methanol extracts of A. lebbeck showed variety of phytochemicals such as alkaloids, glycosides, steroids, flavonoids, saponin, tannin and phenolic compounds. HPTLC profile of ethyl acetate extract revealed up to six phytoconstituents amongst which gallic acid was most prominent. The study concludes that leaves, roots and stem can be differentiated on the basis of macro and microscopic characters, physico-chemical values, HPTLC fingerprint profile and gallic acid detection as marker component. These studies provide referential information for correct identification and standardization of the plant and also be helpful to differentiate A. lebbeck from the closely related other species of Albizia. Keywords: HPTLC, Gallic acid, Pharmacognostical standardization, Phytochemical analysis

Design of Frequency Divider (FD/2 and FD 2/3) Circuits for a Phase Locked Loop

This paper reports on three design of Frequency Divider (FD/2) and Frequency Divider (FD 2/3) circuits. Tanner EDA tool developed on 130nm CMOS technology with a voltage supply of 1.3 V is used to build, model, and compare all circuits. For the FD/2 circuit, E-TSPC Pass Transistor logic uses 1.77 µW, whereas TSPC logic consumes 5.57 µW for the FD 2/3 circuit. It implies that the TSPC logic is the best solution since it meets the speed and power consumption requirements

Recovery and Screening of α-Galacotosidase Producing Lactic Acid Bacteria from Fermented Dairy Products

Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) present in fermented foods has long been consumed by humans without any obvious adverse effects. Therefore, they are potent candidates as vehicles for the delivery of digestive enzymes. Stachyose, a tetrasaccharide, is believed to contribute to flatulent properties of soyabeans that limit their use for human consumption. LAB including some Lactobacillus plantarum, L.fermentum,L. buchneri and reuteri  hydrolyze α- galactosides or non-digestible carbohydrates into digestible carbohydrates during fermentation. These bacteria are therefore a source of α -galactosidase. If soy milk could be fermented with these microorganisms that utilize stachyose either to produce acid or to hydrolyze it to mono and disaccharides, the product thus prepared ought to be less flatulent and therefore, more acceptable. In present study, total 27 lactic acid bacteria were recovered selectively on MRS agar from the various milk and milk products. All the 27 isolates were characterized morphologically and the colonies were white to cream and gram positive. Out of 27 LAB only 5 isolates were found to be positive for α- galactosidase enzyme. α-galactosidase activities were determined by using p-NPG. All 5 α- galactosidase producer were further subjected for various biochemical characterization for partial identification and were catalase negative, and casein hydrolysis, sugar fermentation, nitrate reduction positive. Reduction of α- galactosides by the 5 selected isolates were evaluated. The isolate, RLAB α-4, CLAB α-14, CLAB, CLAB α-20 α-18 and WLAB α-25 degraded 67.56 %, 45.94%, 54.05%, 70.27%, and 64.86% α- galactosides respectively. CLAB α-20 degraded maximum concentration of α- galactosides and RLAB α-14 degraded least concentration of α- galactosides

Potential role of microbial surfactants in environment control recovered from oil contaminated and non-contaminated sites

A total of 20 samples were collected from contaminated (oil contaminated) as well as non-contaminated (agricultural) sites. A total of 10 bacterial isolates were recovered from these samples out of which 6 were recovered from non contaminated sites and 4 were recovered from contaminated sites gave emulsification index ranged from 44% to 73%. Different carbon sources viz. maltose, starch, sucrose, mannitol and nitrogen sources viz. urea, peptone, potassium nitrate and ammonium nitrate were screened to obtain optimum emulsification activity by KMSS09 and KIWS11. In this study mannitol and peptone was evaluated as best carbon and nitrogen source for the production of bioemulsifier. Further these potential isolates were evaluated for some environmental applications viz. Microbial Enhanced Oil Recovery and Bacterial Adhesion to Hydrocarbon assay having important role in bioremediation. The percentage oil recovered by KMSS09, KIWS11 and P. aeruginosa MTCC 2297 was 51.67%, 71.67% and 85.0% respectively. In BATH assay, percentage of bacterial adherence by KMSS09, KIWS11 and P. aeruginosa MTCC 2297 was 80.4%, 86.3% and 93.2% respectively showing wide applicability in bioremediation for pollution remediation of metal and hydrocarbon contaminated field.&nbsp

Data mining Techniques for Health Care: AReview

Data mining is gaining popularity in disparate research fields due to its boundless applications and approaches to mine the data in an appropriate manner. Owing to the changes, the current world acquiring, it is one of the optimal approach for approximating the nearby future consequences. Along with advanced researches in healthcare monstrous of data are available, but the main difficulty is how to cultivate the existing information into a useful practices. To unfold this hurdle the concept of data mining is the best suited. Data mining have a great potential to enable healthcare systems to use data more efficiently and effectively. Hence, it improves care and reduces costs. This paper reviews various Data Mining techniques such as classification, clustering, association, regression in health domain. It also highlights applications, challenges and future work of Data Mining in healthcare

Rephrase, Augment, Reason: Visual Grounding of Questions for Vision-Language Models

An increasing number of vision-language tasks can be handled with little to no training, i.e., in a zero and few-shot manner, by marrying large language models (LLMs) to vision encoders, resulting in large vision-language models (LVLMs). While this has huge upsides, such as not requiring training data or custom architectures, how an input is presented to a LVLM can have a major impact on zero-shot model performance. In particular, inputs phrased in an underspecified way can result in incorrect answers due to factors like missing visual information, complex implicit reasoning, or linguistic ambiguity. Therefore, adding visually grounded information to the input as a preemptive clarification should improve model performance by reducing underspecification, e.g., by localizing objects and disambiguating references. Similarly, in the VQA setting, changing the way questions are framed can make them easier for models to answer. To this end, we present Rephrase, Augment and Reason (RepARe), a gradient-free framework that extracts salient details about the image using the underlying LVLM as a captioner and reasoner, in order to propose modifications to the original question. We then use the LVLM's confidence over a generated answer as an unsupervised scoring function to select the rephrased question most likely to improve zero-shot performance. Focusing on two visual question answering tasks, we show that RepARe can result in a 3.85% (absolute) increase in zero-shot performance on VQAv2 and a 6.41% point increase on A-OKVQA. Additionally, we find that using gold answers for oracle question candidate selection achieves a substantial gain in VQA accuracy by up to 14.41%. Through extensive analysis, we demonstrate that outputs from RepARe increase syntactic complexity, and effectively utilize vision-language interaction and the frozen language model in LVLMs.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, Code: https://github.com/archiki/RepAR

Regulation of wingless and vestigial expression in wing and haltere discs of Drosophila

In the third thoracic segment of Drosophila, wing development is suppressed by the homeotic selector gene Ultrabithorax (Ubx) in order to mediate haltere development. Previously, we have shown that Ubx represses dorsoventral (DV) signaling to specify haltere fate. Here we examine the mechanism of Ubx-mediated downregulation of DV signaling. We show that Wingless (Wg) and Vestigial (Vg) are differentially regulated in wing and haltere discs. In wing discs, although Vg expression in non-DV cells is dependent on DV boundary function of Wg, it maintains its expression by autoregulation. Thus, overexpression of Vg in non-DV cells can bypass the requirement for Wg signaling from the DV boundary. Ubx functions, at least, at two levels to repress Vestigial expression in non-DV cells of haltere discs. At the DV boundary, it functions downstream of Shaggy/GSK3β to enhance the degradation of Armadillo (Arm), which causes downregulation of Wg signaling. In non-DV cells, Ubx inhibits event(s) downstream of Arm, but upstream of Vg autoregulation. Repression of Vg at multiple levels appears to be crucial for Ubx-mediated specification of the haltere fate. Overexpression of Vg in haltere discs is enough to override Ubx function and cause haltere-to-wing homeotic transformations