Isolation and screening of l-asparaginase free of glutaminase and urease from fungal sp.

l-Asparaginase is a chemotherapeutic drug used in the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), a malignant disorder in children. l-Asparaginase helps in removing acrylamide found in fried and baked foods that is carcinogenic in nature. l-Asparaginase is present in plants, animals and microbes. Various microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast and fungi are generally used for the production of l-asparaginase as it is difficult to obtain the same from plants and animals. l-Asparaginase from bacteria causes anaphylaxis and other abnormal sensitive reactions due to low specificity to asparagine. Toxicity and repression caused by bacterial l-asparaginase shifted focus to eukaryotic microorganisms such as fungi to improve the efficacy of l-asparaginase. Clinically available l-asparaginase has glutaminase and urease that may lead to side effects during treatment of ALL. Current work tested 45 fungal strains isolated from soil and agricultural residues. Isolated fungi were tested using conventional plate assay method with two indicator dyes, phenol red and bromothymol blue (BTB), and results were compared. l-Asparaginase activity was measured by cultivating in modified Czapek–Dox medium. Four strains have shown positive result for l-asparaginase production with no urease or glutaminase activity, among these C7 has high enzyme index of 1.57 and l-asparaginase activity of 33.59 U/mL. l-Asparaginase production by C7 was higher with glucose as carbon source and asparagine as nitrogen source. This is the first report focussing on fungi that can synthesize l-asparaginase of the desired specificity. Since the clinical toxicity of l-asparaginase is attributed to glutaminase and urease activity, available evidence indicates variants negative for glutaminase and urease would provide higher therapeutic index than variants positive for glutaminase and urease

Identification of Association between Prescription Drugs and Side Effects by Analyzing Social Network Messages

In this world of internet and social media all people have started discussing about their health information and treatment procedures in the health forums and social media like twitter. Researches are now being focused towards identifying hazardous effects of the prescription drugs and the treatment process through mining this information posted over the internet. Specifically, Twitter can be considered as an important source of information for the detection of such as Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR). The mining or analysis of Twitter messages is not easy because they are of short length, unstructured and almost in informal form. The twitter messages related to drugs prescribed for cardio vascular and diabetes were considered and collected to form the initial dataset. Later they are preprocessed to remove redundancy and improve the further classification process. A set of feature like Semantic, Z-Score, lexicon related features were extracted from the collected tweets to from the training dataset. Next the feature selection is performed using the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) approach. Finally, the selected feature set is utilized to train the Support Vector Machine (SVM). The SVM is validated with a test dataset and its performance was found satisfactory when linear function is used as the kernel. This model can be utilized further to identify the association between prescribed drugs and adverse effects from the Tweets and other messages of health forums

PREVALENCE OF SYSTEMIC DISEASES IN ORAL SURGERY PATIENTS IN SOUTH INDIAN POPULATION

ABSTRACTObjective: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the prevalence of various systemic diseases in oral surgery patients in south Indian population.Methods: The study population composed of 500 randomly selected patients who reported to Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Department of SaveethaDental College, Chennai, over a period of 3 months for various oral surgical procedures. With a standardized questionnaire, a thorough medical anddental history was taken, and patients were grouped according to the system involved. Data collected were statistically analyzed and results obtained.Results: Out of 500 patients, 264 (52.8%) were medically compromised with a higher prevalence of diabetes mellitus (38.85) followed by hypertension(32.2%), gastritis (6.65), and asthma (5.2%). The results were statistically significant.Conclusion: The prevalence of systemic diseases in oral surgery patients is high; therefore, a thorough history taking and careful clinical examinationis mandatory before commencing any dental treatment. This will lead to identifying patients with underlying medical condition and will not onlyresult in modifying dental treatment but also most importantly instituting appropriate management. Medically compromised patients will be onmultiple drug therapy, and dentists must be aware of these drugs and their interactions when they prescribe medications for oral surgical procedures.Keywords: Prevalence, Systemic diseases, Oral surgery, Medical conditions

Evaluation of the microbiome in Periodontal Health and Plaque Covering Supragingival calculus using Next Generation Sequencing Technology

BACKGROUND: Periodontal disease is a microbially induced chronic inflammatory disease resulting in the destruction of the attachment apparatus of the tooth and is one of the most common causes of tooth loss. The microbiota in the periodontal environment initiates the disease process, but is the host response which eventually does the damage. Dental calculus is nothing but mineralized dental plaque which serves as a primary plaque retentive factor and is always covered with a layer of unmineralized plaque. The study hypothesizes that the plaque covering the supragingival calculus could have an influence on the subgingival microbiota which is seen as a characteristic pattern of periodontal disease that which is associated with gingival recession in our population. AIM OF THE STUDY: The aim of this study was to evaluate the microbiome of plaque covering supragingival calculus and to compare it with that of periodontally healthy individuals using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Technology. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 8 supragingival plaque samples were collected from 4 periodontally healthy subjects and 4 patients with plaque covering supragingival calculuswho reported to the outpatient department of Periodontics at Ragas Dental College and Hospital, Chennai. It was then subjected to 16s rRNA sequencing using the NGS technology in an Illumina Solexa sequencer. V3– V4 regions were sequenced and for each of the 8 plaque samples, bacterial phyla, genera and species were identified and their relative abundance was quantified via taxonomic assignment against reference database. RESULTS A total of 7 phyla, 30 genera and 54 species were found in the healthy samples and 9 phyla, 30 genera and 52 species were found in the plaque covering the calculus samples. At the phyla level, there was a similar microbial profile in both the groups. At the genus level, increased presence of newer periodontal pathogens viz. Dialister and Aggregatibacter was observed in the plaque that covered supragingival calculus, which points to a microbial shift. Veillonella tobetsuensis along with the unclassified were the most abundant species in both the groups. There was an increase in Dialister invisus and Aggregatibacter segnis in the calculus group. At phylum, genus and species level, the comparison of overall abundance in between the disease/calculus and periodontal health group was not statistically significant. CONCLUSION As determined by NGS, the microbiome of the plaque that covers the supragingival calculus did not present a distinct microbial profile when compared to that of periodontal health, but points to a microbial shift that could contribute to the disease process. Further studies with a larger sample size and a longitudinal study design would help to draw meaningful clinical implications

Total edge irregularity strength of join of path and complement of a complete graph

An edge irregular total k-labeling of a graph G is a labeling of the vertices and edges of G with labels from the set {1, 2, ..., k} in such a way that any two different edges have distinct weights. The weight of an edge uv is the sum of the label of uv and the labels of vertices u and v. The minimum k for which the graph G has an edge irregular total k-labeling is called the total edge irregularity strength of G. In this paper, we determine the exact value of the total edge irregularity strength of Pn + Km.Publisher's Versio

CFD Analysis of Fuel Spray Characteristics Inside a GDI Engine

The work produced discusses the analysis of gasoline atomization generated by different fuel injectors operating in a high pressure direct injection system. The simulation results of the influence of the fuel injection pressure and combustion chamber back pressure on the changes of the fuel spray geometrical parameters during the injection characterizing the injection quality such as injection penetration at different flow time have been presented in the paper. This study is based on dynamic mesh refinement and uses spray breakup models to simulate engine spray dynamics. It is known that the Lagrangian discrete particle technique for spray modeling is sensitive to gird resolution. An adequate spatial resolution in the spray region is necessary to account for the momentum and energy coupling between the gas and liquid phases. On the other hand, the accurate prediction of the spray structure and drop vaporization requires accurate physical models to simulate fuel injection and spray breakup. The present primary jet breakup model predicts the initial breakup of the liquid jet due to the surface instability to generate droplets. A secondary breakup model is then responsible for further breakup of these droplets. The secondary breakup model considers the growth of the unstable waves that are formed on the droplet surface due to the aerodynamic force. The simulation results are compared with experimental data obtained from literature (ILASS and ICLASS)in gasoline spray structure and liquid penetration length. Validations are also performed by comparing the liquid length of a vaporizing Gasoline spray and its variations with different parameters including the injection pressure, and ambient gas temperature and density. The model is also applied to simulate a direct-injection gasoline engine with a realistic geometry (with piston bowl , engine specifications such as bore to stroke ,compression ratio and volume of cylinder as standards)where piston is moving and spray injection at different CA (crank angle) location.The equivalence ratio contours are studied for better stratification at the time of spark for complete combustion to happen in turn increasing performance and decreasing engine emission. The present spray model with dynamic mesh refinement is shown to predict the spray structure and liquid penetration accurately with reasonable computational cos

A Study of Serum Cholinesterase in Acute Myocardial Infarction and Its Prognostic Significance

INTRODUCTION: Ischemic heart disease are becoming progressively commoner in the younger persons of third and fourth decade. Myocardial infarction is the irreversible death of heart muscle secondary to lack of blood(oxygen) supply. Patient may present with chest pain, breathlessness, fatigue, excessive sweating and palpitation. ECG is the most important tool in the initial evaluation and triage of patients in whom an acute coronary syndrome such as myocardial infarction is suspected. ECG is confirmatory of diagnosis in approximately 80% of cases. Other supportive evidence in the diagnosis of myocardial infarction is cardiac biomarkers and cardiac imaging. Serum cholinesterase is an enzyme that deacetylates acetyl choline to choline and acetic acid at high substrate level. The active centre of the enzyme contains both anionic and esteric site. Some studies have concluded that earlier and rapid fall in serum cholinesterase level of myocardial infarction patients resulted in a grave prognosis. Hence the association between serum cholinesterase in acute myocardial infarction and its use as prognostic marker is studied. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: 1. To study the incidence, levels and patterns of serum cholinesterase activity in acute myocardial infarction. 2. To assess the relationship between the rise and fall of serum cholinesterase in myocardial infarction. 3. To determine the prognosis with relation to changing trend of serum cholinesterase. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The main goal of this study was to evaluate the level of serum cholinesterase in Acute myocardial infarction and its prognostic significance. Serum cholinesterase level in myocardial infarction decreases after 12 hours of onset of symptom probably due to decreased synthesis of enzyme due to hypoxic condition of the liver or there may be more peripheral utilization of this enzyme. An earlier and persistent fall in the serum cholinesterase level assessed on the day of admission, day 3, day 5 indicates poor prognosis. The study was carried out in Government Rajaji Hospital wherein 100 cases of acute ST elevation myocardial infarction were included in the study. Age, sex, alcoholic/ smoking, BMI for each patients were assessed. Routine investigations were done along with ECG and ECHO. Patients were closely monitored and treatment according to the guidelines were done. The level of serum cholinesterase was done on the day of admission, day 3 and day 5. The decreasing/ increasing trend of serum cholinesterase were determined. At the end of 7th day ECG, ECHO were done and patients reassessed. The group of patients who had significant fall in the serum cholinesterase level had poor outcome in the form of MACE. Design of Study: Observational prospective study. Period of Study: Feb 2018 to July 2018. Inclusion Criteria: All patients with Acute ST elevation myocardial infarction Exclusion Criteria: • Patients with onset of symptom (chest pain) > 48 hours. • Liver disease(hepatitis, cirrhosis, malignancy). • Malignancies. • Chronic renal failure. • Dermatomyositis. • Nephrotic syndrome. Toxic goiter. Patients receiving sympathomimetic drug, phenothiazine derivative and atropine or its analogues. RESULTS AND OBSERVATION: 1. Among 100 patients of myocardial infarction, most of them are middle aged with 6 cases of age 70. Age is not significantly related to cholinesterase level. 2. Among 100 cases in this study majority were males. Out of 100 cases, 72 cases were males and the remaining 28 were females. This shows that myocardial infarction is predominant in male population. Sex does not influence the level of cholinesterase. 3. Among 100 people diagnosed as myocardial infarction, 57 cases were alcoholic and the remaining 43 were non- alcoholic. Unless the patient is not suffering from alcoholic liver disease, the alcohol consumption does not affect the level of cholinesterase. 4. Among 100 cases who were taken up for the study the distribution of smoking was found. About 58 cases were found to have the habit of smoking. The remaining 42 cases were non- smokers. Smoking does not significantly affect the level of cholinesterase. 5. Among 100 cases the distribution of BMI was studied. About 7 cases had the BMI of 29. The level of cholinesterase has no significant association with regards to body mass index. 6. Major adverse cardiac events involves conditions like mortality, heart block, ejection fraction < 35% as determined by ECHO and arrhythmias. 7. Based upon the presence or absence of MACE, the myocardial infarction patients were categorized as complicated and uncomplicated groups. The presence of MACE indicates complicated group and the absence indicates uncomplicated group. 8. Depending upon the presence or absence of MACE, myocardial infarction patients were categorized into 2 groups namely complicated and uncomplicated group. In our study about 62 cases were included in the complicated group due to the occurrence of MACE. The remaining 32 were categorized as uncomplicated since there were no MACE events. 9. On comparing the mean of cholinesterase level in complicated and uncomplicated group it is found that the level of cholinesterase level falls significantly in the complicated group than the individuals grouped into the uncomplicated group. This indicates that the decrease in cholinesterase level below normal following myocardial infarction is associated with complications in the form of mortality, EF < 35%, Arrhythmias, heart block. CONCLUSION: The patients who had persistent fall in the serum cholinesterase level had poor prognostic outcome in the form of experiencing major adverse cardiac events. The level of serum cholinesterase level was compared between the complicated and uncomplicated group and found that patients in complicated group had significant fall in the serum cholinesterase measured on the day of admission, day 3 and day 5. Hence fall in serum cholinesterase level can be used as a poor prognostic indicator in ST elevation acute myocardial infarction

Portulaca oleracea inhibit vincristine induced peripheral neuropathy: involvement of ATP-sensitive K+ channels

Background: The Portulaca oleracea belonging to portulacaceae family. It is a herbaceous plant widely distributed throughout the world and used in traditional medicine for many ailments. The present study was to evaluate the antinociceptive action of petroleum ether extract of P. oleracea in vincristine induced peripheral neuropathic pain and the possible mechanisms involved.Methods: Peripheral neuropathy was induced in rats by administration of vincristine sulfate (50 μg/kg i.p.) for 10 consecutive days. The cold tail hyperalgesia was assessed by cold water tail immersion test. To identify the possible mechanisms involved in the antinociceptive action of petroleum ether extract of P. oleracea, acetic acid writhing method was employed. Mice were pretreated with naloxone, glibenclamide before petroleum ether extract treatment to identify the involvement of opioid and potassium channels, respectively.Results: The administration of petroleum ether extract of P. oleracea (100 and 200 mg/kg p.o.) for 10 days significantly attenuated vincristine-induced cold hyperalgesia. Pre-treatment with glibenclamide reversed the antinociceptive effect of P. oleracea, but the naloxone pre-treatment did not reverse the antinociceptive activity of P. oleracea.Conclusion: The results of the present study reveal the antinociceptive effect of P. oleracea in vincristine induced peripheral neuropathy and involving ATP-sensitive potassium channels pathway