Organically templated three-dimensional open-framework metal selenites with a diamondoid network

Three-dimensional open-framework metal selenites of the formula, [H2N(CH2)4NH2]0.5[M(HSeO3)(Se2O5)] (M=Zn, Co or Ni), containing both selenite and diselenite units and intersecting 10-membered channels, have been prepared hydrothermally in the presence of piperazine. The compounds are isomorphous and crystallize in the P-1 space group. The structure is built up of MO6 dimers along with Se2O5 and HSeO3 units, the first two forming sheets, which are connected by the selenite units to yield a three-dimensional non-interpenetrating diamondoid network. The 10-membered channels have an unusual structure, being formed by 4-membered (M2Se2) and 6-membered (M2Se4) rings

Cardiovascular Manifestations and Pulmonary Hypertension in Rheumatoid Arthritis

INTRODUCTION: Is it not disgraceful that a person should, by reason that extraordinary arthritis, be unable to use his hands and should need somebody else to bring food to his mouth and to perform the other necessities for him… and even if overlooks the disgraceful aspect of this, yet one cannot overlook the pain these people suffer, night and day. Galen (128 – 200 A.D). Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the most common inflammatory arthritis and hence an important cause of potentially presenting disability. Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic multi system disease of unknown cause. Although there are a variety of systemic manifestations, the characteristic feature of Rheumatoid arthritis is a persistent inflammatory synovitis, usually involving peripheral joints in a symmetric distribution. The potential of synovial inflammation to cause cartilage damage and bone erosions and subsequent changes in the joint integrity is the hallmark of the disease. Despite its destructive potential, the course of RA can be quite variable. Some patients may experience only a mild oligoarticular illness of brief duration with minimal joint damage, where as others will have a relentless progressive polyarthritis with marked functional impairment. Long- term survival of patients with rheumatoid arthritis is shorter compared with the general population or control population without RA1 Among the different causes of death, increased mortality from heart disease with high mortality from congestive cardiac failure was reported in many studies. Necropsy studies showed a high incidence of pericardial, myocardial and endocardial involvement in RA patients. However, cardiac disease is clinically silent and is rarely a life threatening complication in RA. Cardiac failure is the result of either systolic or diastolic dysfunction, or both. Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction is usually attributable to common structural abnormalities such as hypertrophy or interstitial fibrosis and impaired myocyte relaxation resulting from ischemia. In RA, the cardiac disease can present in various forms in relation with granulomatosis and vasculitis. In patients with RA, all layers of the heart can be inflamed and pericarditis is the most common form of involvement. Moreover valvular disease, myocardial involvement, coronary vasculitis and diastolic dysfunction can be identified. Lung involvement in rheumatoid arthritis is not uncommon, comprising pleural effusion, interstitial fibrosis, pulmonary rheumatoid nodules, and involvement of small airways. Pulmonary hypertension has also been described in RA patients. This is usually the result of RA- associated lung disease. Isolated case reports of primary pulmonary hypertension have also been published. Primary pulmonary hypertension is often clinically silent until well advanced. Sub clinical pulmonary hypertension may be more common in rheumatoid arthritis, since Dawson et al. reported that 21% of all the rheumatoid arthritis patients had pulmonary hypertension identified by echocardiography, without significant cardiac disease or lung disease evident upon pulmonary function testing. In fact, at the initial stages of pulmonary hypertension, symptoms may be absent or may be quite unspecific, causing this diagnosis to be missed or delayed. Doppler echocardiography is a sensitive and non-invasive method of detecting cardiac abnormalities and systolic and/or diastolic function and for detecting pulmonary hypertension. There have been no studies from the Indian sub continent on the prevalence of left ventricular filling abnormalities and pulmonary hypertension in Rheumatoid arthritis patients. So we decided to study these parameters and investigated whether they correlate with the disease duration. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: 1. To study the prevalence of cardiovascular manifestations using echocardiography in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients without clinically evident cardiovascular manifestations. 2. To evaluate the left ventricular filling abnormalities, analyzing transmitral flow in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients without clinically evident cardiovascular manifestations with special regard to disease duration. 3. To study the prevalence of pulmonary hypertension using Doppler echocardiography in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients without clinically evident cardiovascular manifestations and to correlate it with the duration of disease. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study was carried out on 45 patients (nine men and 36 women, mean (SD) age 34.8 (6.7), range 21-50 years) attending the rheumatology out patient department of Madras Medical College and General Hospital with an established diagnosis of RA, as defined by the American Rheumatism Association 1987 criteria. Duration of the disease ranged from 1 to 17 years. Informed consent was obtained from subjects enrolled and the study was approved by the local ethics committee. 45 normal subjects (nine men and 36 women, mean (SD) age 35.4 (6.5), range 23-52 years) were selected as controls. None of the subjects included in the study had evidence of cardiac disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonary tuberculosis or pulmonary thromboembolism as assessed by history, physical examination, Chest radiography and standard 12-lead ECG. In view of the radiation exposure involved in the study, patients were excluded if they were pregnant or planning a pregnancy. Patients with moderate mitral regurgitation, mitral stenosis or a left ventricular ejection fraction below 64% were considered to have a cardiac cause for their PASP and so were excluded. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS: Continuous data were described as mean and standard deviation (mean +/- SD), and categorical variables as numbers. Comparisons between 2 categories were made using Student t test (2 tailed) for continuous variables. To analyze categorical data we performed the chi square test. Pearson correlation was used to correlate the continuous variables like disease duration and pulmonary artery pressure and parameters of diastolic dysfunction. RESULTS: The main demographic, clinical and laboratory features of the 45 patients with RA without clinical evidence of cardiovascular disease. Women outnumbered men. The mean age at the time of diagnosis was 34.82+ 6.67 years. During the course of the disease, extra-articular manifestations were observed in almost 58% (26) of the patients. Rheumatoid nodules were found in 10 patients, all of whom were rheumatoid factor positive. CONCLUSION: The following are the conclusions from the study; 1. Cardiovascular manifestations are common in Rheumatoid arthritis patients. 2. The relation between transmitral flow alteration and disease duration suggests a sub-clinical myocardial involvement with disease progression and may be related to the high incidence of cardiovascular deaths in patients with RA. 3. The relationship between the pulmonary artery pressure and disease duration and age also suggests a sub clinical involvement of the pulmonary vasculature with disease progression and may be relevant to the high incidence of cardiovascular deaths observed in patients with RA

STIFDB—Arabidopsis Stress Responsive Transcription Factor DataBase

Elucidating the key players of molecular mechanism that mediate the complex stress-responses in plants system is an important step to develop improved variety of stress tolerant crops. Understanding the effects of different types of biotic and abiotic stress is a rapidly emerging domain in the area of plant research to develop better, stress tolerant plants. Information about the transcription factors, transcription factor binding sites, function annotation of proteins coded by genes expressed during abiotic stress (for example: drought, cold, salinity, excess light, abscisic acid, and oxidative stress) response will provide better understanding of this phenomenon. STIFDB is a database of abiotic stress responsive genes and their predicted abiotic transcription factor binding sites in Arabidopsis thaliana. We integrated 2269 genes upregulated in different stress related microarray experiments and surveyed their 1000 bp and 100 bp upstream regions and 5′UTR regions using the STIF algorithm and identified putative abiotic stress responsive transcription factor binding sites, which are compiled in the STIFDB database. STIFDB provides extensive information about various stress responsive genes and stress inducible transcription factors of Arabidopsis thaliana. STIFDB will be a useful resource for researchers to understand the abiotic stress regulome and transcriptome of this important model plant system

T2D-Db: An integrated platform to study the molecular basis of Type 2 diabetes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is a non insulin dependent, complex trait disease that develops due to genetic predisposition and environmental factors. The advanced stage in type 2 diabetes mellitus leads to several micro and macro vascular complications like nephropathy, neuropathy, retinopathy, heart related problems etc. Studies performed on the genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology of this disease to understand the pathophysiology of type 2 diabetes mellitus has led to the generation of a surfeit of data on candidate genes and related aspects. The research is highly progressive towards defining the exact etiology of this disease.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>T2D-Db (Type 2 diabetes Database) is a comprehensive web resource, which provides integrated and curated information on almost all known molecular components involved in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes mellitus in the three widely studied mammals namely human, mouse and rat. Information on candidate genes, SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism) in candidate genes or candidate regions, genome wide association studies (GWA), tissue specific gene expression patterns, EST (Expressed Sequence Tag) data, expression information from microarray data, pathways, protein-protein interactions and disease associated risk factors or complications have been structured in this on line resource.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Information available in T2D-Db provides an integrated platform for the better molecular level understanding of type 2 diabetes mellitus and its pathogenesis. Importantly, the resource facilitates graphical presentation of the gene/genome wide map of SNP markers and protein-protein interaction networks, besides providing the heat map diagram of the selected gene(s) in an organism across microarray expression experiments from either single or multiple studies. These features aid to the data interpretation in an integrative way. T2D-Db is to our knowledge the first publicly available resource that can cater to the needs of researchers working on different aspects of type 2 diabetes mellitus.</p

EERP: Intelligent Cluster based Energy Enhanced Routing Protocol Design over Wireless Sensor Network Environment

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)) and the associated technologies are growing day-by-day in a drastic level. The Wireless Sensor Network medium has a distributed communication logic, in which it is interconnected with set of wireless sensor nodes and a unique basestation. A basestation stays in a constant place to provide a support to the transceivers for achieving a successful communication between source and destination entities. This kind of wireless communication mediums highly depends on the basestation to acquire the transaction needs as well as the basestation acts as a gateway between transmitter and receiver units. The cluster based wireless communication models are introduced to provide a flaw free communication between entities on WSN region with handling of wireless sensor nodes in the form of cluster. In literature several cluster enabled wireless communication models are designed, but all are strucked up with improper node placements and associated energy level mismatching. These issues raise cost efficient problems in Wireless Sensor Network environment. SO, that a new energy efficient routing protocol with an effective communication strategy is required to solve such issues in past. This paper introduced a new routing protocol with high efficient data transmission norms, in which it is called as Energy Enhanced Routing Protocol (eeRP). The proposed approach of eeRP associates the powerful clustering logic in this scheme to provide a fault free communication model to the WSN environment. By using this approach the standardized routing model is constructed with respect to the sensor nodes and basestation. The most important part of cluster based wireless communication model is the handling of Cluster-Head (CH), in which it needs to be elected based on certain communication principles such as the estimation of distance, position of other nodes in the cluster region, basestation positioning and the node capability. These constraints are essential to analyze the Cluster-Head to improve the pathway estimation process. The proposed approach of eeRP utilizes the powerful CH election algorithm called Firefly to provide an intellectual cluster head election process. The performance level of the proposed approach eeRP is estimated based on the efficiency of throughput, path selection efficiency, reduced energy consumption ratio and the network lifetime improvement. The experimental results assure these metrics in resulting section with graphical proofs

Simultaneous expression of regulatory genes associated with specific drought‐adaptive traits improves drought adaptation in peanut

Adaptation of crops to drought-prone rain-fed conditions can be achieved by improving plant traits such as efficient water mining (by superior root characters) and cellular-level tolerance mechanisms. Pyramiding these drought-adaptive traits by simultaneous expression of genes regulating drought-adaptive mechanisms has phenomenal relevance in improving stress tolerance. In this study, we provide evidence that peanut transgenic plants expressing Alfalfa zinc finger 1 (Alfin1), a root growth-associated transcription factor gene, Pennisetum glaucum heat-shock factor (PgHSF4) and Pea DNA helicase (PDH45) involved in protein turnover and protection showed improved tolerance, higher growth and productivity under drought stress conditions. Stable integration of all the transgenes was noticed in transgenic lines. The transgenic lines showed higher root growth, cooler crop canopy air temperature difference (less CCATD) and higher relative water content (RWC) under drought stress. Low proline levels in transgenic lines substantiate the maintenance of higher water status. The survival and recovery of transgenic lines was significantly higher under gradual moisture stress conditions with higher biomass. Transgenic lines also showed significant tolerance to ethrel-induced senescence and methyl viologen-induced oxidative stress. Several stress-responsive genes such as heat-shock proteins (HSPs), RING box protein-1 (RBX1), Aldose reductase, late embryogenesis abundant-5 (LEA5) and proline-rich protein-2 (PRP2), a gene involved in root growth, showed enhanced expression under stress in transgenic lines. Thus, the simultaneous expression of regulatory genes contributing for drought-adaptive traits can improve crop adaptation and productivity under water-limited conditions

A Sustainable Technique for Colony Multiplication by Eduction of Wild Nests of the Stingless Bee Tetragonula iridipennis Smith

Colony multiplication of stingless bees, Tetragonula iridipennis, largely relies on the eduction of wild colonies from their natural nesting sites in India. During the hiving of wild colonies, colonies were destroyed with the loss of robust wild foragers and built-in storage reserves over the years. The present study was conducted to devise a technique to sustainably multiply the colonies of stingless bees from the wild colony and the colony establishment and development during the eduction process. The annexure hives provided for eduction were accepted in a shorter time (3.25 ± 1.18 days), with the construction of storage pots observed at 7.75 ± 1.59 days after hive acceptance by the bees. The movement of foragers between the wild colony and the annexure hives was noticed for 13.80 ± 4.20 days. The foragers settled in the annexure hives and started foraging after 18.20 ± 2.49 days. The advancing fronts were observed at 26.67 ± 2.58 days after the addition of the laying queen in the established annexure hives. There was a significant increase in the number of inhive workers after the queen seeding in the annexure hives. This technique is the easiest and most sustainable non- destructive way of multiplication of stingless bee colonies without loss in viability of the perennial wild colony

All India Co-ordinated Research Project on Biological Control of Crop Pests

Not AvailableSurveys were undertaken to document the fauna of insects, spiders and entomopathogenic nematodesacross India despite the travel restrictions due to COVID-19. The expeditions undertaken yielded several species of natural enemies viz.,Chalcididae (66.32%), Eulophidae (19.94%), Pteromalidae (4.14%) and Encyrtidae (3.37%) of Hymenoptera and 14 species of trichogrammatids representing 7 genera. The predominant genera of hymenopteran insect parasitoids were identified as Dirhinus Dalman (30.47%) followed by Brachymeria Westwood (27.73%), Hockeria Walker (22.27%) and Antrocephalus Kirby (18.75%). Revisionary studies of the braconid parasitoid, Apanteles sp. ater-group including subgroup eublemmae of the genus (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) of the Oriental region was carried out with an illustrated key, in which a total of 97 species were recorded and illustrated. Three species of tachinid flies, Peribaea orbata on larva of Spodoptera litura, Halidaia luteicornis on larva of Parnara sp., Sturmiopsis inferens on larva of Sesamia inferens and Carcelia sp. from the larvae of Helicoverpa armigera (Noctuidae) were identified and described. The spider fauna of rice ecosystem was documented, where six species of long jawed orb weaver, Tetragnatha species have been described of which T. keyserlingi was the predominant species across the surveyed locations in Tamil Nadu. The species, Tetragnathanitens collected from Tamil Nadu and Telangana was the first report from India. The spitting spider, Scytodes fusca Walckenaer of family Scyotidae was redescribed with documentation of variations in the vulval pattern of the female and theory about the introduction of this Pantropical species to India.Not Availabl

Impact of severity, duration, and etiology of hyperthyroidism on bone turnover markers and bone mineral density in men

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hyperthyroidism is accompanied by osteoporosis with higher incidence of fracture rates. The present work aimed to study bone status in hyperthyroidism and to elucidate the impact of severity, duration, and etiology of hyperthyroidism on biochemical markers of bone turnover and bone mineral density (BMD).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Fifty-two male patients with hyperthyroidism, 31 with Graves' disease (GD) and 21 with toxic multinodular goiter (TNG), with an age ranging from 23 to 65 years were included, together with 25 healthy euthyroid men with matched age as a control group. In addition to full clinical examination, patients and controls were subjected to measurement of BMD using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometery scanning of the lower half of the left radius. Also, some biochemical markers of bone turnover were done for all patients and controls.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Biochemical markers of bone turnover: included serum bone specific alkaline phosphatase, osteocalcin, carboxy terminal telopeptide of type l collagen also, urinary deoxypyridinoline cross-links (DXP), urinary DXP/urinary creatinine ratio and urinary calcium/urinary creatinine ratio were significantly higher in patients with GD and TNG compared to controls (P < 0.01). However, there was non-significant difference in these parameters between GD and TNG patients (P > 0.05). BMD was significantly lower in GD and TNG compared to controls, but the Z-score of BMD at the lower half of the left radius in patients with GD (-1.7 ± 0.5 SD) was not significantly different from those with TNG (-1.6 ± 0.6 SD) (>0.05). There was significant positive correlation between free T3 and free T4 with biochemical markers of bone turnover, but negative correlation between TSH and those biochemical markers of bone turnover. The duration of the thyrotoxic state positively correlated with the assessed bone turnover markers, but it is negatively correlated with the Z-score of BMD in the studied hyperthyroid patients (r = -0.68, P < 0.0001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Men with hyperthyroidism have significant bone loss with higher biochemical markers of bone turnover. The severity and the duration of the thyrotoxic state are directly related to the derangement of biochemical markers of bone turnover and bone loss.</p

Molecular profiling of cervical cancer progression

Most cancer patients die of metastatic or recurrent disease, hence the importance to identify target genes upregulated in these lesions. Although a variety of gene signatures associated with metastasis or poor prognosis have been identified in various cancer types, it remains a critical problem to identify key genes as candidate therapeutic targets in metastatic or recurrent cancer. The aim of our study was to identify genes consistently upregulated in both lymph node micrometastases and recurrent tumours compared to matched primary tumours in human cervical cancer. Taqman Low-Density Arrays were used to analyse matched tumour samples, obtained after laser-capture microdissection of tumour cell islands for the expression of 96 genes known to be involved in tumour progression. Immunohistochemistry was performed for a panel of up- and downregulated genes. In lymph node micrometastases, most genes were downregulated or showed expressions equal to the levels found in primary tumours. In more than 50% of lymph node micrometastases studied, eight genes (AKT, BCL2, CSFR1, EGFR1, FGF1, MMP3, MMP9 and TGF-β) were upregulated at least two-fold. Some of these genes (AKT and MMP3) are key regulators of epithelial–mesenchymal transition in cancer. In recurrent tumours, almost all genes were upregulated when compared to the expression profiles of the matched primary tumours, possibly reflecting their aggressive biological behaviour. The two genes showing a consistent downregulated expression in almost all lymph node metastases and recurrent tumours were BAX and APC. As treatment strategies are very limited for metastatic and recurrent cervical cancer, the upregulated genes identified in this study are potential targets for new molecular treatment strategies in metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer