Screening the Efficacy of Some Traditional Herbal Drugs for Treatment of Hymenolepis diminuta Infection in Rats

Background: Hymenolepis nana (human infecting tapeworm) and H. diminuta (rodent infecting tapeworm) are currently incriminated to be the cause of non-specific bowel disturbances. They are in most instances resistant to the available anticestodal compounds due to misuse of drugs and probably adaptation of the parasites to the commercially available drugsObjective: Our objective is to study the toxicity and curative efficacy of different medicinal plants that are candidate for the treatment of tapeworm infections in man.Methods: Four medicinal plants were tested for their ability to treat Hymenolepis diminuta tapeworm infection in rats. These plants are Amaranthus viridis, Cucurbita maxima, Hagenia abyssinica and Balanites aegyptiaca. Selection of these plants was based on ethnobotanicalinformation. The evaluation of the efficiency of these medicinal plants was based on the “controlled test design”, modified from Moskey and Harwood10: Following pre-infection screening, and life cycle establishment rats were grouped to six experimental groups for each plant. Stool specimens were collected from all groups, the mean of eggs counts per gram of faeces were counted. The reduction percentage of eggs per gram (EPG) was calculated and time to clear eggs was compared with that of Niclosamide. Niclosamide drug was used in this study as a control treatment14.Results: There were no signs of toxic effect on the rats due to administration of any of the tested medicinal plants. Amaranthus viridis leavs exhibited a very weak efficacy. It did not reduce eggs ineither water or food significantly as compared to the untreated control group (p> 0.05). The deparasitization activity of this plant (35%) was not significant. Similarly, Balanites aegyptiaca seeds were not effective in treatment of the infection in rats. Egg counts and deparasitization infood and water, were not significantly (p> 0.05) different from those of the untreated control group. On the other hand, Cucurbita maxima and Hagenia abyssinica seeds were very effective in the treatment of Hymenolepis diminuta infection in rats. Egg reduction (100%) was highly significant (p< 0.01) in food and water as compared to that of the untreated control group of rats (zero%). C. maxima seeds in food deparasitized 80% of the worms, while Hagenia abyssinica deparasitized 100%.Conclusion: Our conclusion was that Hagenia abyssinica was the most active plant of this group in the treatment of Hymenolepis diminuta infection in rats

Tunable CsPb(Br/Cl)3 perovskite nanocrystals and further advancement in designing light emitting fiber membranes

Cesium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals (NCs) have drawn a great deal of interest in optoelectronic and photonic applications due to their intrinsic and attractive photoluminescence properties. Though, their commercially viability is of concern due to their intrinsic instability. In this study, blue and green luminous PMMA-CsPbX3(X=Cl/Br) fibers were fabricated via forcespinning technique, where the polymer matrix encapsulated the NCs. Blue CsPbX3 NCs (b- CPX NCs) were synthesized at ambient conditions while blue to green CsPbX3 NCs (g-CPX NCs) fine color tuning was obtained after heat treatment at 150°C.Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) shows fibers with diameters in the single digit microscale. Efficient encapsulation of NCs in the PMMA fiber was confirmed using FTIR spectroscopy. UV visible spectra of the NCs suggested a quantum confinement effect. Pristine NCs shows bright blue and green emission from b-CPX and g-CPX NCs under UV irradiation (365 nm) which was successfully reproduced even upon encapsulation in the PMMA matrix. In both cases, the PMMA besides promoting QD encapsulation also enhanced the photoluminescent quantum yield (PLQY) from 25.5% to 31.1% (blue PMMA fibers) and 42.6% to 51.4% (green PMMA fibers) compare to bare NCs PLQY. The PMMA-CsPbX3(X=Cl/Br) also possessed narrow half-peak width compared to pristine NCs suggesting high color purity. This work provides a novel polymer fiber-based encapsulation approach to solve the intrinsic instability issues of CsPbX3 NCs, therefore prompting promising practical applications

HandVoxNet: Deep Voxel-Based Network for 3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Map

3D hand shape and pose estimation from a single depth map is a new and challenging computer vision problem with many applications. The state-of-the-art methods directly regress 3D hand meshes from 2D depth images via 2D convolutional neural networks, which leads to artefacts in the estimations due to perspective distortions in the images. In contrast, we propose a novel architecture with 3D convolutions trained in a weakly-supervised manner. The input to our method is a 3D voxelized depth map, and we rely on two hand shape representations. The first one is the 3D voxelized grid of the shape which is accurate but does not preserve the mesh topology and the number of mesh vertices. The second representation is the 3D hand surface which is less accurate but does not suffer from the limitations of the first representation. We combine the advantages of these two representations by registering the hand surface to the voxelized hand shape. In the extensive experiments, the proposed approach improves over the state of the art by 47.8% on the SynHand5M dataset. Moreover, our augmentation policy for voxelized depth maps further enhances the accuracy of 3D hand pose estimation on real data. Our method produces visually more reasonable and realistic hand shapes on NYU and BigHand2.2M datasets compared to the existing approaches.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables, CVP

The Personalization of Clopidogrel Antiplatelet Therapy: The Role of Integrative Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacometabolomics

Dual antiplatelet therapy of aspirin and clopidogrel is pivotal for patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention. However, the variable platelets reactivity response to clopidogrel may lead to outcome failure and recurrence of cardiovascular events. Although many genetic and nongenetic factors are known, great portion of clopidogrel variable platelets reactivity remain unexplained which challenges the personalization of clopidogrel therapy. Current methods for clopidogrel personalization include CYP2C19 genotyping, pharmacokinetics, and platelets function testing. However, these methods lack precise prediction of clopidogrel outcome, often leading to insufficient prediction. Pharmacometabolomics which is an approach to identify novel biomarkers of drug response or toxicity in biofluids has been investigated to predict drug response. The advantage of pharmacometabolomics is that it does not only predict the response but also provide extensive information on the metabolic pathways implicated with the response. Integrating pharmacogenetics with pharmacometabolomics can give insight on unknown genetic and nongenetic factors associated with the response.This review aimed to review the literature on factors associated with the variable platelets reactivity response to clopidogrel, as well as appraising current methods for the personalization of clopidogrel therapy. We also aimed to review the literature on using pharmacometabolomics approach to predict drug response, as well as discussing the plausibility of using it to predict clopidogrel outcome

Twenty Years of SUGRA

A brief review is given of the developments of mSUGRA and its extensions since the formulation of these models in 1982. Future directions and prospects are also discussed.Comment: Invited talk at the International Conference BEYOND-2003, Schloss Ringberg, Germany, June 10-14, 2003; 21 pages, Late

Two decades of neuroscience publication trends in Africa.

Neuroscience research in Africa remains sparse. Devising new policies to boost Africa's neuroscience landscape is imperative, but these must be based on accurate data on research outputs which is largely lacking. Such data must reflect the heterogeneity of research environments across the continent's 54 countries. Here, we analyse neuroscience publications affiliated with African institutions between 1996 and 2017. Of 12,326 PubMed indexed publications, 5,219 show clear evidence that the work was performed in Africa and led by African-based researchers - on average ~5 per country and year. From here, we extract information on journals and citations, funding, international coauthorships and techniques used. For reference, we also extract the same metrics from 220 randomly selected publications each from the UK, USA, Australia, Japan and Brazil. Our dataset provides insights into the current state of African neuroscience research in a global context

Influence of the initial chemical conditions on the rational design of silica particles

The influence of the water content in the initial composition on the size of silica particles produced using the Stöber process is well known. We have shown that there are three morphological regimes defined by compositional boundaries. At low water levels (below stoichiometric ratio of water:tetraethoxysilane), very high surface area and aggregated structures are formed; at high water content (>40 wt%) similar structures are also seen. Between these two boundary conditions, discrete particles are formed whose size are dictated by the water content. Within the compositional regime that enables the classical Stöber silica, the structural evolution shows a more rapid attainment of final particle size than the rate of formation of silica supporting the monomer addition hypothesis. The clearer understanding of the role of the initial composition on the output of this synthesis method will be of considerable use for the establishment of reliable reproducible silica production for future industrial adoption

Loss of balancing selection in the βS globin locus

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Probably the best example of the rise and maintenance of balancing selection as an evolutionary trend is the role of S-haemoglobin (HbS - rs334) in protecting from malaria. Yet, the dynamics of such a process remains poorly understood, particularly in relation to different malaria transmission rates and the genetic background of the affected populations.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We investigated the association of haemoglobin HbS in protection from clinical episodes of malaria in two populations/villages where malaria is endemic, but mostly presenting in mild clinical forms. Five-hundred and forty-six individuals comprising 65 and 82 families from the Hausa and Massalit villages respectively were genotyped for HbS. Allele and genotype frequencies as well as departure from Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium were estimated from four-hundred and seventy independent genotypes across different age groups. Age-group frequencies were used to calculate the coefficient-of-fitness and to simulate the expected frequencies in future generations.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Genotype frequencies were within Hardy-Weinberg expectations in Hausa and Massalit in the total sample set but not within the different age groups. There was a trend for a decrease of the HbS allele frequency in Hausa and an increase of frequency in Massalit. Although the HbS allele was able to confer significant protection from the clinical episodes of malaria in the two populations, as suggested by the odds ratios, the overall relative fitness of the HbS allele seems to have declined in Hausa.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Such loss of balancing selection could be due to a combined effect of preponderance of non-clinical malaria in Hausa, and the deleterious effect of the homozygous HbS under circumstances of endogamy.</p