197 research outputs found
Detection of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Rs2013162 of IRF6 Gene in Patient with Cleft Lip and Palate
Background: Cleft lip and palate are congenital disorders which induce affected individuals medically, socially and psychologically. The objective of this study was to investigate the association of Single Nucleotide Polymorphism(SNP); rs2013162 of IRF6 Gene in Patient with Cleft Lip and Palate.
Materials and Methods: Fifty patients with non-syndromic CL/P were included in present study alongwith fifty individuals with no psychiatric history as controls. In all of the these individuals, search for Single nucleotide polymorphism was carried out by designing sequence specific primers. The sequence was amplified by using Real time PCR and products were investigated by visualizing high resolution melting curve upon HRM-PCR.
Results: The logistic regression and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were applied to investigate the association of IRF6 SNP rs2013162 with disease. Results revealed no association of this polymorphism with non-syndromic CL/P.
Conclusion: We found no association of IRF6 SNP rs2013162 in patients with non-syndromic CL/P. Further study is required with larger sample size to validate the findings of the present study in Pakistani population and along with this SNP other polymorphisms of the same gene should be analyzed to find out the association with the non-syndromic CL/P
Unraveling Binding Effects of Cobalt(II) Sepulchrate with the Monooxygenase P450 BM-3 Heme Domain Using Molecular Dynamics Simulations
One of the major limitations to exploit enzymes in industrial processes is their dependence on expensive reduction equivalents like NADPH to drive their catalytic cycle. Soluble electron transfer (ET) mediators like Cobalt(II)Sepulchrate have been proposed as a cost-effective alternative to shuttle electrons between an inexpensive electron source and enzyme redox center. The interactions of these molecules with enzymes are not elucidated at molecular level yet. Herein, molecular dynamics simulations are performed to understand the binding and ET mechanism of the Cobalt(II)Sepulchrate with the heme domain of cytochrome P450BM-3. The study provides a detailed map of ET mediator binding sites on protein surface that resulted prevalently composed by Asp and Glu amino acids. The Cobalt(II)Sepulchrate do not show a preferential binding to these sites. However, among the observed binding sites, only few of them provide efficient ET pathways to heme iron. The results of this study can be used to improve the ET mediator efficiency of the enzyme for possible biotechnological applications
Influence of Crohnās disease related polymorphisms in innate immune function on ileal microbiome
We have previously identified NOD2 genotype and inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) phenotype, as associated with shifts in the ileal microbiome (ādysbiosisā) in a patient cohort. Here we report an integrative analysis of an expanded number of Crohn's disease (CD) related genetic defects in innate immune function (NOD2, ATG16L1, IRGM, CARD9, XBP1, ORMDL3) and composition of the ileal microbiome by combining the initial patient cohort (Batch 1, 2005ā2010, n = 165) with a second consecutive patient cohort (Batch 2, 2010ā2012, n = 118). These combined patient cohorts were composed of three non-overlapping phenotypes: 1.) 106 ileal CD subjects undergoing initial ileocolic resection for diseased ileum, 2.) 88 IBD colitis subjects without ileal disease (predominantly ulcerative colitis but also Crohnās colitis and indeterminate colitis, and 3.) 89 non-IBD subjects. Significant differences (FDR C. difficile infection, and NOD2 genotype on ileal dysbiosis in the expanded analysis. The relative abundance of the Proteobacteria phylum was positively associated with ileal CD and colitis phenotypes, but negatively associated with NOD2R genotype. Additional associations with ORMDL3 and XBP1 were detected at the phylum/subphylum level. IBD medications, such as immunomodulators and anti-TNFĪ± agents, may have a beneficial effect on reversing dysbiosis associated with the IBD phenotype. Exploratory analysis comparing microbial composition of the disease unaffected region of the resected ileum between 27 ileal CD patients who subsequently developed endoscopic recurrence within 6ā12 months versus 34 patients who did not, suggested that microbial biomarkers in the resected specimen helped stratify patients with respect to risk of post-surgical recurrence.</div
Counter-current chromatography for the separation of terpenoids: A comprehensive review with respect to the solvent systems employed
Copyright @ 2014 The Authors.This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.Natural products extracts are commonly highly complex mixtures of active compounds and consequently their purification becomes a particularly challenging task. The development of a purification protocol to extract a single active component from the many hundreds that are often present in the mixture is something that can take months or even years to achieve, thus it is important for the natural product chemist to have, at their disposal, a broad range of diverse purification techniques. Counter-current chromatography (CCC) is one such separation technique utilising two immiscible phases, one as the stationary phase (retained in a spinning coil by centrifugal forces) and the second as the mobile phase. The method benefits from a number of advantages when compared with the more traditional liquid-solid separation methods, such as no irreversible adsorption, total recovery of the injected sample, minimal tailing of peaks, low risk of sample denaturation, the ability to accept particulates, and a low solvent consumption. The selection of an appropriate two-phase solvent system is critical to the running of CCC since this is both the mobile and the stationary phase of the system. However, this is also by far the most time consuming aspect of the technique and the one that most inhibits its general take-up. In recent years, numerous natural product purifications have been published using CCC from almost every country across the globe. Many of these papers are devoted to terpenoids-one of the most diverse groups. Naturally occurring terpenoids provide opportunities to discover new drugs but many of them are available at very low levels in nature and a huge number of them still remain unexplored. The collective knowledge on performing successful CCC separations of terpenoids has been gathered and reviewed by the authors, in order to create a comprehensive document that will be of great assistance in performing future purifications. Ā© 2014 The Author(s)
Exogenous application of gibberellic acid improves the maize crop productivity under scarce and sufficient soil moisture condition
Drought stress creates
imbalance or deficiency of some growth
regulators in plants, which leads toward
reduced crop yield. Gibberellic acid is one
of the most important growth regulators in
plants, which improve drought tolerance in
plants under optimum concentration. A field
experiment was conducted under exogenous
application of gibberellic acid under normal
or drought condition and with or without
gibberellic acid application. Crop growth
and yield parameters were assesses during
the experimentation. Study revealed that
crop reduced growth in term of leaf area
index (LAI), leaf area duration (LAD), crop
growth rate (CGR), net assimilation rate
(NAR) and total dry matter (TDM) under
drought condition, while these parameters
were improved with gibberellic acid
application. Similary, improved growth rate
resulted in better performance of yield
attributes (cob length, cob diameter, grains
per cob, grain weight and yield). Gibberellic
acid application improved the crop
performance at optimum irrigation, as well
as under reduced irrigation. Although
highest crop yield was recorded with
gibberellic acid application under optimum
irrigation level, while its application under
drought stress improved crop tolerance and
resulted in better crop yield, similar to
optimum irrigation level. Exogenous
application of gibberellic acid not only
improved the drought tolerance in maize,
but also increased the crop yield under
normal condition
Use of natural nitrogen stabilizers to improve nitrogen use efficiency and wheat crop yield
Complex nature of nitrogen
fertilizer in soil and poor management
practices are major causes of low fertilizer
use efficiency in Pakistan. These factors
further increases nitrogen losses in form
of nitrate leaching and volatilization of
ammonium, as well as nitric oxide which
are burning economic and environmental
threats. Keeping in view the demand of
urea application in Pakistan and its low
efficiency, we hypothized that appropriate
urea management with neem formulations or biofertilizers can enhance the nitrogen use efficiency. We designed experiment with treatments: T0 (N0 application), T1 (recommended nitrogen), T2 (recommended nitrogen + biofertilizer), T3 (recommended
nitrogen + neem seed extract), T4 (75% recommended nitrogen + biofertilizer), T5 (75% recommended nitrogen + neem seed extract), T6 (recommended nitrogen + biofertilizer + neem seed extract), T7 (75% recommended nitrogen + biofertilizer + neem seed extract) in wheat crop. The experiment was laid out in randomized complete block design (RCBD) with split plot arrangements. Different approaches for stabilized nitrogen fertilizer responded significantly for the wheat plant height, tillers per plant, number of grains per
spike, 1000-grain yield, grain yield and harvest index. Result exhibited that wheat crop enhanced yield attributes and finally the yield under treatment T6 and T7 for both wheat cultivars. Treatments comparison with recommended nitrogen (T1) revealed that all treatments with biofertilizer, as well as with neem seed, enhanced crop performance along with nitrogen use efficiency. It can be concluded that nitrogen fertilizer can be stabilized in the soil with the use of different natural products for sustainable crop production
Two-stream deep learning architecture-based human action recognition
Human action recognition (HAR) based on Artificial intelligence reasoning is the most important research area in computer vision. Big breakthroughs in this field have been observed in the last few years; additionally, the interest in research in this field is evolving, such as understanding of actions and scenes, studying human joints, and human posture recognition. Many HAR techniques are introduced in the literature. Nonetheless, the challenge of redundant and irrelevant features reduces recognition accuracy. They also faced a few other challenges, such as differing perspectives, environmental conditions, and temporal variations, among others. In this work, a deep learning and improved whale optimization algorithm based framework is proposed for HAR. The proposed framework consists of a few core stages i.e., frames initial preprocessing, fine-tuned pre-trained deep learning models through transfer learning (TL), features fusion using modified serial based approach, and improved whale optimization based best features selection for final classification. Two pre-trained deep learning models such as InceptionV3 and Resnet101 are fine-tuned and TL is employed to train on action recognition datasets. The fusion process increases the length of feature vectors; therefore, improved whale optimization algorithm is proposed and selects the best features. The best selected features are finally classified using machine learning (ML) classifiers. Four publicly accessible datasets such as Ut-interaction, Hollywood, Free Viewpoint Action Recognition using Motion History Volumes (IXMAS), and centre of computer vision (UCF) Sports, are employed and achieved the testing accuracy of 100%, 99.9%, 99.1%, and 100% respectively. Comparison with state of the art techniques (SOTA), the proposed method showed the improved accuracy
Clinical profile, outcomes and improvement in symptoms and productivity in rhinitic patients in Karachi, Pakistan
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Rhinitis can cause a heavy toll on patients because of its bothersome effects on productivity. This retrospective study was conducted to explore the clinical profile, outcomes and improvement in the symptoms and productivity resulting from treatment of allergic rhinitis in Pakistan.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We carried out a retrospective file review of all allergic rhinitis patients who presented to the Ear, Nose, Throat Consulting Clinic from January, 2006 to June, 2008 using a structured proforma especially designed for this purpose. Data was entered and analyzed using SPSS v. 16.0.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The charts of 169 patients were reviewed. The mean age of the patients was 35.2 Ā± 9.1 years. Sixty percent patients were male. Ninety eight patients (58%) reported allergy symptoms to be present at both home and work. One hundred and two patients (60.4%) had symptoms severe enough to cause absence from work or academic activities. Up to seventy one percent patients were spending between 1000 - 3000 Pakistani Rupees (1 US$= 83.3 Pakistani rupees) on the treatment of allergic rhinitis per year. One hundred and fifty one patients (89.3%) reported an improvement in rhinitic symptoms and productivity while 18 patients (10.7%) didn't. This improvement was significantly associated with satisfaction with treatment (p < 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Allergic rhinitis, a ubiquitous disease, was seen to cause a strain on patients in the form of recurrent treatment-related expenses as well as absenteeism from work or other daily activities. Symptoms and productivity improved significantly after treatment.</p
A numerical study of magnetohydrodynamic transport of nanofluids from a vertical stretching sheet with exponential temperature-dependent viscosity and buoyancy effects
In this paper, a mathematical study is conducted of steady incompressible flow of a temperature-dependent viscous nanofluid from a vertical stretching sheet under applied external magnetic field and gravitational body force effects. The Reynolds exponential viscosity model is deployed. Electrically-conducting nanofluids are considered which comprise a suspension of uniform dimension nanoparticles suspended in viscous base fluid. The nanofluid sheet is extended with a linear velocity in the axial direction. The Buonjiornio model is utilized which features Brownian motion and thermophoresis effects. The partial differential equations for mass, momentum, energy and species (nano-particle concentration) are formulated with magnetic body force term. Viscous and Joule dissipation effects are neglected. The emerging nonlinear, coupled, boundary value problem is solved numerically using the RungeāKutta fourth order method along with a shooting technique. Graphical solutions for velocity, temperature, concentration field, skin friction and Nusselt number are presented. Furthermore stream function plots are also included. Validation with Nakamuraās finite difference algorithm is included. Increasing nanofluid viscosity is observed to enhance temperatures and concentrations but to reduce velocity magnitudes. Nusselt number is enhanced with both thermal and species Grashof numbers whereas it is reduced with increasing thermophoresis parameter and Schmidt number. The model is applicable in nano-material manufacturing processes involving extruding sheets
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