Reduction of truncated Kit Expression in Men with Abnormal Semen Parameters, Globozoospermia and History of Low or Fertilization Failure

Objective: Phospholipase C zeta 1 (PLCζ) is one of the main sperm factor involved in oocyte activation and other factors may assist this factor to induce successful fertilization. Microinjection of recombinant tr-kit, a truncated form of c-kit receptor, into metaphase II-arrested mouse oocytes initiate egg activation. Considering the potential roles of tr-KIT during spermiogenesis and fertilization, we aimed to assess expression of tr-KIT in sperm of men with normal and abnormal parameters and also in infertile men with previous failed fertilization and globozoospermia. Materials and Methods: This experimental study was conducted from September 2015 to July 2016 on 30 normozoospermic and 20 abnormozoospermic samples for experiment one, and also was carried out on 10 globozoospermic men, 10 men with a history low or failed fertilization and 13 fertile men for experiment two. Semen parameters and sperm DNA fragmentation were assessed according to WHO protocol, and TUNEL assay. Sperm tr-KIT was evaluated by flow cytometry, immunostaining and western blot. Results: The results show that tr-KIT mainly was detected in post-acrosomal, equatorial and tail regions. Percentage of tr-KIT-positive spermatozoa in abnormozoospermic men was significantly lower than normozoospermic men. Also significant correlations were observed between sperm tr-KIT with sperm count (r=0.8, P<0.001), motility (r=0.31, P=0.03) and abnormal morphology (r=-0.6, P<0.001). Expression of tr-KIT protein was significantly lower in infertile men with low/ failed fertilization and globozoospermia compared to fertile men. The significant correlation was also observed between tr-KIT protein with fertilization rate (r=-0.46, P=0.04). In addition, significant correlations were observed between sperm DNA fragmentation with fertilization rate (r=-0.56, P=0.019) and tr-KIT protein (r=-0.38, P=0.04). Conclusion: tr-KIT may play a direct or indirect role in fertilization. Therefore, to increase our insight regarding the role of tr-KIT in fertilization further research is warranted. © 2019 Royan Institute (ACECR). All rights reserved

Umbelliprenin-coated Fe3O4 magnetite nanoparticles: Antiproliferation evaluation on human Fibrosarcoma cell line (HT-1080)

The potential applications of Fe3O4 magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs) in nanomedicine as drug delivery systems are well known. In this study we prepared umbelliprenin-coated Fe3O4 MNPs and evaluated the antiproliferative effect of combination in vitro. After synthesis of Fe3O4 MNPs, particles were characterized by transmission electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction spectroscopy techniques. The natural candidate compound — umbelliprenin— was isolated and identified and umbelliprenin-coated Fe3O4 MNPs were prepared, using precipitation method. The surface chemistry of umbelliprenin-coated Fe3O4 MNPs as well as their thermal decomposition characteristics was examined using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and Thermogravimetric Analyzer equipment, respectively. HT-1080 cells were cultured until the logarithmic phase of growth, and MTT assay was successfully carried out to evaluate the possible cytotoxic effects of umbelliprenin-coated Fe3O4 MNPs in viable cells in vitro. The results demonstrated that umbelliprenin has moderate antiproliferative effects with IC50 value of 50 μg/mL. However, the combination of umbelliprenin and Fe3O4 MNPs showed the IC50 value of 9 μg/mL. In other words, cell proliferation decreased to the remarkably-low proportion of 45% after treating cells with umbelliprenin-coated Fe3O4 MNPs. This suggests that with the aid of nanoparticles as carriers, natural products may have even broader range of medical applications in future

cuHE: A Homomorphic Encryption Accelerator Library

We introduce a CUDA GPU library to accelerate evaluations with homomorphic schemes defined over polynomial rings enabled with a number of optimizations including algebraic techniques for efficient evaluation, memory minimization techniques, memory and thread scheduling and low level CUDA hand-tuned assembly optimizations to take full advantage of the mass parallelism and high memory bandwidth GPUs offer. The arithmetic functions constructed to handle very large polynomial operands using number-theoretic transform (NTT) and Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) based methods are then extended to implement the primitives of the leveled homomorphic encryption scheme proposed by Löpez-Alt, Tromer and Vaikuntanathan. To compare the performance of the proposed CUDA library we implemented two applications: the Prince block cipher and homomorphic sorting algorithms on two GPU platforms in single GPU and multiple GPU configurations. We observed a speedup of 25 times and 51 times over the best previous GPU implementation for Prince with single and triple GPUs, respectively. Similarly for homomorphic sorting we obtained 12-41 times speedup depending on the number and size of the sorted elements

Fabrication of Docetaxel Surfaced Fe3O4 Magnetite Nanoparticles and their Cytotoxicity on 4 T1 Breast Cancer Cells

Background:In the recent years, there is an increasing attention to the using of Fe3O4 magnetite nanoparticles (MNPs) as drug delivery systems. Application of this nanoparticles could profit advantages of nanomedicine to enhance biological activity of pharmaceutical ingredients. Methods:Fe3O4 MNPs were synthesised by a chemical method and characterized by transmission electron microscopy and energy-dispersive spectroscopy techniques. In the next step, docetaxel-coated Fe3O4 MNPs were prepared, using percipitation method. The surface chemistry of docetaxel-coated Fe3O4 MNPs as well as their thermal decomposition characteristics were examined using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and thermogravimetric analyzer equipment, respectively. The cytotoxicity assay was conducted on 4 T1 breast cancer carsinoma by MTT assay to evaluate the possible in vitro antiproliferative effects of docetaxel-coated Fe3O4 MNPs. Results:During precipitation process, docetaxel molecules were precipitated on the surface of Fe3O4 MNPs by the ratio of 3:100 w/w which indicates that each milligram of coated Fe3O4 MNPs averagely contained 30 mug pure docetaxel compound. Docetaxel showed aniproliferative effects against mentioned cell line. The higestest concentartion of docetaxel (80 mug/ml) caused about 80% cell death. However, the results demostarted that much lower amounts of docetaxel will be needed in combination of Fe3O4 MNPs to produce the potent antiproliferative effect compared to docetaxel alone. Dose response cytotoxicity assay of docetaxel-coated Fe3O4 MNPs against 4 T1 breast cancer cells showed that lower amount of docetaxel (0.6 mug/ml) can exhibit higher cytotoxic effect against this cancer cell line (90% cell death)