Chlorpyrifos Induced Region Specific Vulnerability in Rat CNS and Modulation by Age and Cold Stress: An Interactive Study

Chlorpyrifos (CPF)​, an organophosphorus insecticide is known to cause ill health in non-​target animals by inducing oxidative stress. In this study influence of cold stress (15°C and 20°C) and age as modulating factors on CPF induced oxidative stress was addressed to assess age-​related differences and vulnerability in central nervous system of rats. The results indicated an interaction with age and cold exposure resulting in marked decreased activity levels of SOD (P < 0.05)​, CAT (P < 0.05)​, GPx (P < 0.05)​, GST (P < 0.05) followed by increased MDA (P < 0.05) and decreased GSH levels (P < 0.05)​. The ANOVA and Post-​hoc anal. showed that antioxidant enzymes decreased significantly (P < 0.05) on CPF exposure. Moreover synergistic action of CPF and cold stress at 15°C caused higher inhibition on comparison with CPF and cold stress alone and together at 20°C indicating the extent of peroxidative damage in discrete regions of CNS. Further this study showed young individuals to be more sensitive than adults

Extent of Heavy Metal Accumulation in Sewage Irrigated Soils and Their Impact on Distribution of Earthworm Communities: Linking Chromium and Zinc Toxicity on Growth and Reproduction in Selected Earthworm Species.

Soil ecosystem polluted by metals affect the structure of soil invertebrate population(s) and dynamics leading to altered distribution of species. This study focuses on earthworm distribution in sewage irrigated agricultural lands around Bangalore. The occurrence of reported species from the sampled areas is Eudrilus eugeniae, Lampito maurutii, Pontoscolex corethrurus, Polypheretima elongata, Perioynx excavates and Eisenia fetida. Laboratory studies conducted to evaluate feed ingestion rate and body mass changes in earthworms exposed to metal spiked soils revealed species specific pattern. Eudrilus eugeniae and Lampito maurutii showed a steep increase in body weight, while Pontoscolex corethrurus exhibited decreased trend upon Zn exposure. Contrarily a significant (p<0.05) decline in body weight was evident in all the three species upon exposure to Cr spiked soils. The observed alterations in feeding and body mass index concomitantly influenced the reproductive parameters. Rate of hatchability and reproductive function found to be decreased in Cr spiked soils in all the three species studied. Contrarily, increased hatchability was observed in E.eugeniea and L.maurutii followed by a decrease rate in P.corethrurus upon exposure of Zn spiked soils. However, reproductive rate found to be increased in E.eugeniea and P.corethrurus with decreased trend in L.maurutii. Thus, use of sewage polluted water for irrigation purpose has led to increased soil metal concentration impacting earthworm physiology and distribution

PHYTOCHEMICAL SCREENING AND IN VITRO ANTIOXIDANT POTENTIAL OF TRIBULUS TERRESTRIS FRUIT AND MESUA FERREA FLOWER EXTRACTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

Objective: This study aimed to investigate the antioxidants and free radicals scavenging properties of ethanolic extracts from Tribulus terrestris fruit (TTF) and Mesua ferrea flower (MFF).Methods: The antioxidant and free radical scavenging activities were measured by using standard protocols against phytoextracts used at 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 µg/ml concentration. Total phenolic and flavonoid content were estimated using Folin-Ciocalteu and aluminium-chloride reagent assay methods.Results: Among the extracts, MFF showed the highest total antioxidant ability followed by TTF. With regard to various scavenging activities, MFF had the highest radical scavenging activity than TTF extract closely resembled the standards. Also, the reducing capacity on ferrous ion was high in MFF than TTF. The quantified phenolic contents of TTF and MFF ethanolic extracts were 27.0±0.36 and 57.0±0.32 mg gallic acid equivalent per gram extract respectively. A positive correlation (p value&lt;0.001) was observed between phenolic content and free radical scavenging efficiencies.Conclusion: The results confirm that both MFF and TTF are important sources of natural antioxidants and serves as an effective free radical scavengers and/or inhibitors. Hence, both extracts are suitable plant-based pharmaceutical products can be used to handle 'free radical-mediated diseases

ANTI-ATHEROSCLEROTIC ACTIVITY OF ETHANOLIC EXTRACT OF CHRYSANTHEMUM INDICUM L. FLOWERS AGAINST HIGH-FAT DIET-INDUCED ATHEROSCLEROSIS IN MALE WISTAR RATS

  Objective: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the anti-atherosclerotic activity of ethanolic extract of Chrysanthemum indicum (EECI) flowers against high-fat diet induction in male Wistar rats.Methods: The method used for induction of atherosclerosis was high-fat diet for 28 days. Rats were divided into five groups (n=6). Group I served as normal. Group II serves as high-fat diet-treated group. Group III serves as standard treated with high-fat diet+atorvastatin (30 mg/kg, p.o). Group IV serves as low dose treated with high-fat diet+EECI (150 mg/kg, p.o.). Group V serves as high dose treated with high-fat diet+EECI (300 mg/kg, p.o.). The following parameters, glucose, high-density lipoprotein (HDL), low-density lipoprotein (LDL), total cholesterol (TC), very LDL (VLDL), triglycerides (TG), atherogenic index (AI), serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase, serum glutamic pyruvic transaminase, total protein, food consumption, and body weight, were evaluated and histopathological studies were performed.Results: The results showed that EECI at a dose of 150 mg/kg and 300 mg/kg exhibited significant decrease in glucose, TG, TC, LDL-cholesterol (LDL-C), HDL, VLDL, AI, and total protein levels when compared to high-fat diet group. This investigation reveals that the extract-treated groups lower the serum TC and LDL-C levels significantly, which reduces the risk of coronary heart disease.Conclusion: The experimental studies show that the EECI of both doses 150 mg/kg and 300 mg/kg, respectively, showed significant reduction in lipid profile, glucose, and total protein. From the study, the plant extract showed anti-atherosclerotic activity and thus authenticates its ethnomedicinal use.Â

Document Based Clustering For Detecting Events in Microblogging Websites

Social media has a great in?uence in our daily lives. People share their opinions, stories, news, and broadcast events using social media. This results in great amounts of information in social media. It is cumbersome to identify and organize the interesting events with this massive volumes of data, typically browsing, searching, monitoring events becomes more and more challenging. A lot of work has been done in the area of topic detection and tracking (TDT). Most of these methods are based on single-modality (e.g., text, images) information or multi-modality information. In the single-modality analysis, many existing methods adopt visual information (e.g., images and videos) or textual information (e.g., names, time references, locations, title, tags, and description) in isolation to model event data for event detection and tracking. This problem can be resolved by a novel multi-model social event tracking and an evolutionary framework not only effectively capturing the events, but also generates the summary of these events over time. We proposed a novel method works with mmETM, which can effectively model the social documents, which includes the long text along with the images. It learns the similarities between the textual and visual modalities to separate the visual and non-visual representative topics. To incorporate our method to social tracking, we adopted an incremental learning technique represented as mmETM, which gives informative textual and visual topics of event in social media with respect to the time. To validate our work, we used a sample data set and conducted various experiments on it. Both subjective and quantitative assessments show that the proposed mmETM technique performs positively against a few best state-of-the art techniques

Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Aging Rat Brain Regions upon Chlorpyrifos Toxicity and Cold Stress: An Interactive Study

Mitochondrial dysfunction and consequent energy depletion are the major causes of oxidative stress resulting to bring alterations in the ionic homeostasis causing loss of cellular integrity. Our previous studies have shown the age-associated interactive effects in rat central nervous system (CNS) upon co-exposure to chlorpyrifos (CPF) and cold stress leading to macromolecular oxidative damage. The present study elucidates a possible mechanism by which CPF and cold stress interaction cause(s) mitochondrial dysfunction in an age-related manner. In this study, the activity levels of Krebs cycle enzymes and electron transport chain (ETC) protein complexes were assessed in the isolated fraction of mitochondria. CPF and cold stress (15 and 20 °C) exposure either individually or in combination decreased the activity level of Krebs cycle enzymes and ETC protein complexes in discrete regions of rat CNS. The findings confirm that cold stress produces significant synergistic effect in CPF intoxicated aging rats. The synergism between CPF and cold stress at 15 °C caused a higher depletion of respiratory enzymes in comparison with CPF and cold stress alone and together at 20 °C indicating the extent of deleterious functional alterations in discrete regions of brain and spinal cord (SC) which may result in neurodegeneration and loss in neuronal metabolic control. Hence, co-exposure of CPF and cold stress is more dangerous than exposure of either alone. Among the discrete regions studied, the cerebellum and medulla oblongata appears to be the most susceptible regions when compared to cortex and SC. Furthermore, the study reveals a gradual decrease in sensitivity to CPF toxicity as the rat matures

DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF DAPAGLIFLOZIN BY REVERSED-PHASE HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID CHROMATOGRAPHY METHOD AND IT'S FORCED DEGRADATION STUDIES

  Objective: To develop and validate a simple, selective, precise, and accurate method for the estimation of dapagliflozin using reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) technique in bulk and tablet formulation.Methods: The proposed method utilizes chromatographic conditions hypersil BDS (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μ), mobile phase was buffer:acetonitrile (60:40) ratio, flow rate was maintained 1 ml/minute, column temperature was set at 30°C, detection wave length was 245 nm, and diluent was mobile phase.Results: By injecting 5 times of the standard solution system suitability parameters were studied, and results were found well under the acceptance criteria. The linearity study was performed by taking 25-150% levels, and the R2 value was found to be 0.999, precision was found to be 0.5 for repeatability and 0.31 for intermediate precision. The % recovery was found to be 99.89%. Limit of detection and limit of quantitation were found to be 0.60 μg/ml and 1.81 μg/ml, respectively. The % purity was found to be 99.71%. Degradation study on dapagliflozin was performed and concluded that the purity threshold was more than purity angle and within the acceptable range.Conclusion: The developed RP-HPLC method for dapagliflozin was found to be simple, precise, accurate, reproducible, and cost effective. Statistical analysis of the developed method conforms that the proposed method is an appropriate and it can be useful for the routine analysis. This method gives the basic idea to the researcher who is working in area such as product development and finish product testing

Study of metopic suture in south Indian skulls

Background: The cranial sutures and their development is the most interesting in the field of cranial growing and shaping. Metopism is partially or totally persisting suture extending from the nasion to the anterior angle of the bregma of frontal bone.  Methods: Total 100 human adult dry skulls were collected from south India for present study to find out the incidence of metopic suture.  Results: Out of 100 skulls, found one complete and one incomplete metopic suture.Conclusions: Present study may be useful for diagnostic and surgical intervention, particularly during frontal craniotomy

Permethrin induced neuronal inefficiency in the supraoesophageal ganglion of mulberry silkworm, Bombyx mori. L

The primary target for pyrethroid insecticides is the nervous system. Available literature on the toxicity of pyrethroids to mulberry silkworm, are confined to specific tissues like haemolymph, fat body, eggs of silk moth and no study is indicated on supraoesophageal ganglion tissue, hence this study was conducted. In this study the changes occurring in the level of cholinergic and GABAergic transmitters (ACh and GABA)​; their connected enzymes viz., ChAT, AChE, GAD were studied in the supraoesophageal ganglionic tissue of silkworm Bombyx mori upon permithrin intoxication. Findings indicate that suppression of acetyl cholinesterase has led to the accumulation of ACh in greater quantities. Contrary to the cholinesterase suppression, a profound increase in GABAergic system was evident in the nervous tissue suggesting existence of an imbalance of excitatory-​inhibitory interplay in the supraoesophageal ganglia due to the toxic insult caused by permethrin; this substantially affects the growth, development, fecundity and silk prodn. In conclusion, the permethrin induced neurotoxicity resulted a series of perturbations in silkworm neurotransmitter metab

Discrimination of Textures Using Texton Patterns

Textural patterns can often be used to recognize familiar objects in an image or retrieve images with similar texture from a database. Texture patterns can provide significant and abundance of texture and shape information. One of the recent significant and important texture features called Texton represents the various patterns of image which is useful in texture analysis. The present paper is an extension of our previous paper [1]. The present paper divides the 3 D7; 3 neighbourhood into two different 2 D7; 2 neighbourhood grids each consist four pixels. On this 2 D7; 2 grids shape descriptor indexes (SDI) are evaluated separately and added to form a Total Shape Descriptor Index Image (TSDI). By deriving textons on TSDI image Total Texton Shape Matrix (TTSM) image is formed and Grey Level Co-Occurence Matrix (GLCM) parameters are derived on it for efficient texture discrimination. The experimental result shows the efficacy of the present metho