A novel diblock copolymer of (monomethoxy poly [ethylene glycol]-oleate) with a small hydrophobic fraction to make stable micelles/polymersomes for curcumin delivery to cancer cells

Curcumin is a potent natural anticancer agent, but its effectiveness is limited by properties such as very low solubility, high rate of degradation, and low rate of absorption of its hydrophobic molecules in vivo. To date, various nanocarriers have been used to improve the bioavailability of this hydrophobic biomaterial. This study investigates the encapsulation of curcumin in a novel nanostructure of monomethoxy poly(ethylene glycol)-oleate (mPEG-OA) and its anticancer effect. Tests were done to determine the critical micelle concentration (CMC), encapsulation efficiency, drug-loading efficiency, and cytotoxicity (against U87MG brain carcinoma cells and HFSF-PI3 cells as normal human fibroblasts) of some nanodevice preparations. The results of fluorescence microscopy and cell-cycle analyses indicated that the in vitro bioavailability of the encapsulated curcumin was significantly greater than that of free curcumin. Cytotoxicity evaluations showed that half maximal inhibitory concentrations of free curcumin and curcumin-loaded mPEG-OA for the U87MG cancer cell line were 48 μM and 24 μM, respectively. The Annexin-V-FLUOS assay was used to quantify the apoptotic effect of the prepared nanostructures. Apoptosis induction was observed in a dose-dependent manner after curcumin-loaded mPEG-OA treatments. Two common self-assembling structures, micelles and polymersomes, were observed by atomic force microscopy and dynamic light scat­tering, and the abundance of each structure was dependent on the concentration of the diblock copolymer. The mPEG-OA micelles had a very low CMC (13.24 μM or 0.03 g/L). Moreover, atomic force microscopy and dynamic light scattering showed that the curcumin-loaded mPEG-OA polymersomes had very stable structures, and at concentrations 1,000 times less than the CMC, at which the micelles disappear, polymersomes were the dominant structures in the dispersion with a reduced size distribution below 150 nm. Overall, the results from these tests revealed that this nanocarrier can be considered as an appropriate drug delivery system for delivering curcumin to cancer cells. © 2014 Erfani-Moghadam et al

Some new Black Mildew, Asterina, collected from North -Western U.P.

During the morphotaxonomic studies of Black Mildews from Himalayan foothills of North-Western Uttar Pradesh, 20 species of Asterina were collected. Out of these, Asterina syzygicola collected on Syzygium jambolanum and Asterina heniana collected on Syzygium henianum are described and illustrated as new to scienc

Eight-Chain and Full-Network Models and Their Modified Versions for Rubber Hyperelasticity: A Comparative Study

The eight-chain model, also known as Arruda-Boyce model, is widely used to capture the rate-independent hyperelastic response of rubber-like materials. The parameters of this model are physically based and explained from micromechanics of chain molecules. Despite its excellent performance with only two material parameters to capture bench measurements in uniaxial and pure shear regime, the model is known to be significantly deficient in predicting the equibiaxial data. To ameliorate such drawback, over the years, several modified versions of this successful model have been proposed in the literature. The so-called full-network model is another micromechanically motivated chain model, which has also few modified versions in the literature. For this study, two modified versions of the full-network model have been selected. In this contribution, five modified versions of the Arruda-Boyce model and two modified versions of full-network model are critically compared with the classical eight-chain model for their adequacy in representing equibiaxial data. To do a comparison of all selected models in reproducing the well-known Treloar data, the analytical expressions for the three homogeneous deformation modes, that is, uniaxial tension, equibiaxial tension, and pure shear have been derived and the performances of the selected models are analysed. The comparative study demonstrates that modified Flory-Erman model, Gornet-Desmorat (GD) model, Meissner-Matějka model, and bootstrapped eight-chain model predict well the three deformation modes compare to the classical eight-chain model

Intellectual Property Dimensions of Biodiversity Resources: From Evidence to Action

171-177The Indian law on protecting plant variety and biodiversity, along with its attendant rules and guidelines, tries to capture the biological inventions and evergreening. However, the techno-legal dimension of access and benefit-sharing falls beyond the pale and purview of the natural scientist's intense examination. The Supreme Court, High Court, and National Green Tribunal (NGT) frequently confront the legal interpretation of Normally Traded Commodities (NTCs), Value-Added Products (VAPs), and prospecting of biological resources. These vexed issues having a potential bearing on scientific research and innovations necessitate amicable resolution of complex biodiversity disputes to keep people and researchers' faith and other commercial entities in the judiciary intact. The paper attempts to subsume these concerns and highlight the repercussions of judicial interpretation and perception of biological resources on biotechnological research and discoveries in the Indian context

Waterlogging and salinity management in the Sindh Province. Volume 1 - The irrigated landscape: resource availability across the hydrological divides

Irrigation management / River basins / Irrigated farming / Climate / Irrigation systems / Irrigation canals / Discharges / Water balance / Waterlogging / Salinity / Groundwater development / Tube wells / Water table / Drainage / Public sector / Land reclamation / Pakistan / Sindh Province / Indus Basin / Rohri / Larkana / Shikarpur / Hairdin / North Dadu / Ghotki / East Khairpur / Sukkur Barrage

Assessment of Wireless Technologies for deployment in Intelligent Transportation System based on Internet of Things

Use of Internet of Things (IoT) with modern wireless network is a trend of the emerging technologies for different systems which can be deployed in various kinds of environment to monitor, communicate with or control the associated elements in the system. The activities e.g., monitoring and communication by IoT can play an important role to design an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). In this paper, we assess the suitability of IoT enabled wireless technology to be used for ITS. We performed some comparative study to find the best wireless technology that provides reliability, low cost, less power consumption and less data latency for next generation ITS.This technology will reduce energy consumption of the deployed IoT devices as well as ensure safety, efficiency and convenient for transportation systems

On mitigating hop-to-hop congestion problem in IoT enabled Intra-Vehicular communication

Internet of Things enabled Intra-Vehicular Network (IVN) refers to the network where large number of sensors are connected with each other for sharing the vehicle's status information in order to develop a smart vehicular system. The number of sensor nodes in the vehicle has increased significantly due to the increasing vehicular applications. The phenomenon of congestion poses a problem in the IVN where the traffic load and number of sensors are increased. This problem can be resolved by mitigating the limitation of the existing Media Access Control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, we address this issue and proposed a MAC strategy for solving this problem in this network. Furthermore, we discuss the design of IVN scenario and the performance is evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay. The simulation results reveal the effectiveness of our proposal

A block-based RDWT-SVD image watermarking method using human visual system characteristics

With the rapid growth of internet technology, image watermarking method has become a popular copyright protection method for digital images. In this paper, we propose a watermarking method based on 4×4 image blocks using redundant wavelet transform with singular value decomposition considering human visual system (HVS) characteristics expressed by entropy values. The blocks which have the lower HVS entropies are selected for embedding the watermark. The watermark is embedded by examining U2,1 and U3,1 components of the orthogonal matrix obtained from singular value decomposition of the redundant wavelet transformed image block where an optimal threshold value based on the trade-off between robustness and imperceptibility is used. In order to provide additional security, a binary watermark is scrambled by Arnold transform before the watermark is embedded into the host image. The proposed scheme is tested under various image processing, compression and geometrical attacks. The test results are compared to other watermarking schemes that use SVD techniques. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve higher imperceptibility and robustness under different types of attacks compared to existing schemes. Our method provides high robustness especially under image processing attacks, JPEG2000 and JPEG XR attacks. It has been observed that the proposed method achieves better performance over the recent existing watermarking schemes

An Efficient Image Compression Technique using Tchebichef Bit Allocation

The psychovisual technique has brought about significant improvement in pursuing image analysis and image reconstruction. The psychovisual threshold can be utilized to find the optimal bits-budget for image signals. The psychovisual system is developed based on noticeable distortion of the compressed image from an original image in frequency order. This paper proposes an image compression technique using Tchebichef psychovisual threshold for generating an optimal bits-budget of image signals. The bits-budget is designed to replace the main role of quantization tables in image compression. The experimental results show that the proposed bits-budget technique can improve the visual quality of image output by 42 of JPEG compression. The visual image quality of Thcebichef bits allocation produces less artifact effect and distortion of the image pixels. A set of bits-budgets gives excellent improvement in the image quality at a low average bit length of Huffman code than the image coding using quantization tables