Meldonium: drug which brought disrepute to sport

World of sports have been rocked by doping scandals every now and then and World Anti-Doping Agency(WADA) has banned several offending drugs at different times to counter this menace. Meldonium is the recent addition to the long list of drugs banned by WADA to prevent its misuse among the athletes. Meldonium is a carnitine synthesis inhibitor and has been approved by some European countries for the management of cardiac diseases like angina pectoris and congestive cardiac failure. Apart from these, it has numerous other indications like bronchial asthma, bronchitis and retinopathies. It had also been used by athletes across the world because of its presumptive role in increasing the performance

PROBIOTIC CHARACTERIZATION OF BACILLUS SUBTILIS STRAIN ISOLATED FROM INFANT FECAL MATTER REVEALED BY 16S rRNA GENE AND PHYLOGENETIC ANALYSIS

Objective: The rationale of our study was to isolate and identify the putative probiotic strain from infant fecal matter exhibiting a broad range of antimicrobial activity and to analyze the effect of different culturing conditions on its probiotic properties and the production of antimicrobial metabolites. Methods: In the present study, bacterial strains were screened for probiotic properties and antimicrobial activity from infant fecal matter (6 months–2 years). The effect of varying culture conditions such as tolerance to acid, bile salt, phenol, NaCl, pH, incubation period, and temperature along with autoaggregation assay, hydrophobicity, and hemolysis was studied. The characterization of the potent strain was studied by morphological, biochemical, and 16S rRNA gene sequencing along the phylogenetic affiliation of the strain was studied. Results: Two putative probiotic bacteria (DAM and IFM) were isolated, identified, characterized, and predicted at pH 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0, the isolate IFM had 50%, 60%, and 70% survivability, while isolate DAM had 55%, 63%, and 75% survivability, respectively. At a bile salt concentration of 0.5%, both isolates had a 75% survival rate. The isolates exhibited a high percentage of hydrophobicity and autoaggregation. The isolates also had non-hemolytic activity and were susceptible to many clinical tested antibiotics (tetracycline, erythromycin, ampicillin, gentamycin, penicillin, etc.). The isolate showed antimicrobial activity against enteric pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Shigella dysenteriae. The accession number of Bacillus subtilis MT279753 and MK453362 was submitted to NCBI. Conclusion: The result revealed that isolates have potent probiotic properties and possess a direct influence on the production of antimicrobial metabolites. These parameters can be modified for the improvement of the potentiality of the isolates

Effect of resveratrol on diabetic neuropathy in wistar albino rats

Background: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) is a common chronic disease with increasing prevalence worldwide. Prolonged uncontrolled hyperglycemia, dyslipidemia are major risk factor for its complication like neuropathy. Since there is no definite treatment for diabetic neuropathy, this study aims to evaluate the effect of resveratrol on diabetic neuropathy in high fat diet with low dose streptozotocin induced type-2 DM model in wistar albino rats.Methods: First type 2 diabetic rat model was established. Wistar albino rats, fed with high-fat diet (HFD) rendered diabetic with streptozotocin, were divided into 6 groups, disease control (DC) treated with vehicle, standard control (SC) which received metformin, test groups treated with 5, 10, and 20 mg/kg b.w. of resveratrol and combination of half dose of metformin and resveratrol (10 mg/kg) (TC). A group of six normal animals served as normal control (NC), another six as HFD control. Fasting plasma glucose, lipid profile were measured one week after induction of diabetes. The animals were then treated orally for 2 weeks after which the same parameters were repeated. Behavioral biomarkers for neuropathy are measured in 4 weeks and 6 weeks of treatment. The in-vivo results were analyzed by one way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s multiple comparison test for biochemical parameters and Kruskal Wallis test followed by Dun’s multiple comparison test for behavioral biomarkers.Results: Increase in fasting plasma glucose (FPG), deranged lipid profile, increased neuropathy in DC compared to NC, HFD control while a significant decrease in FBG, improved pain behavior with SC, test groups (p<0.05) as compared to the DC group.Conclusions: Resveratrol prevents diabetic neuropathy

Effects of resveratrol on oxidative stress in high fat diet /streptozocin induced diabetic wistar albino rats

Background: Diabetes mellitus is a common chronic disease. One of the pathophysiology is found to be oxidative stress. This study aims to evaluate the effect of resveratrol on oxidative stress in high fat diet (HFD)/streptozotocin induced diabetic rats.Methods: Wistar albino rats, fed with HFD rendered diabetic with streptozotocin, were divided into 6 groups, namely the diabetic control treated with vehicle (DC), standard control which received metformin (SC), test groups treated with 5,10, and 20 mg/kg b.w. of resveratrol and combination of half dose of metformin and resveratrol (10 mg/kg)(TC). A group of six normal animals served as normal control (NC), another six as HFD control. Fasting blood glucose, lipid profile and serum MDA and SOD were measured one week after induction of diabetes. The animals were then treated orally for 2 weeks after which the same parameters were repeated. The in-vivo results were analysed by one way ANOVA followed by Tukey’s multiple comparison test.Results: The DC group demonstrated a increase in the fasting blood glucose compared to NC, HFD control while a significant decrease in the fasting blood glucose was observed with SC, Test groups (p<0.05) as compared to the DC group. TC showed a significant improvement in dyslipidemia compared to their baseline values (p<0.05). There was significant change in the serum MDA level and SOD activity.Conclusions: Resveratrol improves oxidative stress in diabetic rats

Etioclinical profile and outcome of acute bacterial meningitis in post neo natal U-5 children: a study from tertiary care center of coastal Odisha, India

Background: Acute bacterial meningitis (ABM) continues to remain an important cause of morbidity, mortality and handicap in children despite availability of wide range of antimicrobials. The microorganisms vary according to age, socio economic condition and geographical area along with other factors.Methods: A prospective study was conducted over 2.5 years from October 2012 to April 2015 in the department of pediatrics, SVP Institute of Pediatrics, SCB Medical College, Cuttak, Odisha, India. Total 104 subjects were included after taking meticulous inclusion criteria.Results: Out of 104 cases, majority (70.2%) were infants. 60.6% were male with M:F ratio 1.5:1. Fever was the commonest symptom in 69.2% followed by convulsion 61.5%, vomiting 36.5%, altered sensorium 33.7%. On examination 69.2% children were febrile, having bulging fontanelle in 34.6%, pneumonia 31.7%, positive meningeal sign 29.8%, cranial nerve palsies 14.4%, papilledema 12.5% and hemiplegia 11.5% cases. GCS were poor (100/cumm). In 82 cases (78.8%) etiological agents were identified consisting of H. influenzae in 46.4%, S. pneumoniae in 36.6%, E. coli in 8.6% and others in 8.4%. CT scan of brain revealed brain edema in 29.4% followed by subdural effusion 19.6%, hydrocephalus 17.6% and infarction in 5.9%. 63.5% children were recovered completely. Mortality was 16.3% with sequelae in 20.2% cases.Conclusions: Hib and Pneumococci were two most common organisms causing ABM in U-5 children with high mortality and sequelae which can be prevented by early diagnosis, optimum lab diagnostic facility and mass vaccination. There is urgent need to include Pneumococcal vaccine in NIP for substantial reduction of infant mortality

Clinical Trial Recommendations Using Semantics-Based Inductive Inference and Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Designing a new clinical trial entails many decisions, such as defining a cohort and setting the study objectives to name a few, and therefore can benefit from recommendations based on exhaustive mining of past clinical trial records. Here, we propose a novel recommendation methodology, based on neural embeddings trained on a first-of-a-kind knowledge graph of clinical trials. We addressed several important research questions in this context, including designing a knowledge graph (KG) for clinical trial data, effectiveness of various KG embedding (KGE) methods for it, a novel inductive inference using KGE, and its use in generating recommendations for clinical trial design. We used publicly available data from clinicaltrials.gov for the study. Results show that our recommendations approach achieves relevance scores of 70%-83%, measured as the text similarity to actual clinical trial elements, and the most relevant recommendation can be found near the top of list. Our study also suggests potential improvement in training KGE using node semantics.Comment: 13 pages (w/o bibliography), 4 Figures, 6 Table

Diabetes Prediction: A Study of Various Classification based Data Mining Techniques

Data Mining is an integral part of KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) process. It deals with discovering unknown patterns and knowledge hidden in data. Classification is a pivotal data mining technique with a very wide range of applications. Now a day’s diabetic has become a major disease which has almost crippled people across the globe. It is a medical condition that causes the metabolism to become dysfunctional and increases the blood sugar level in the body and it becomes a major concern for medical practitioner and people at large. An early diagnosis is the starting point for living well with diabetes. Classification Analysis on diabetic dataset is a part of this diagnosis process which can help to detect a diabetic patient from non-diabetic. In this paper classification algorithms are applied on the Pima Indian Diabetic Database which is collected from UCI Machine Learning Laboratory. Various classification algorithms which are Naïve Bayes Classifier, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, Support Vector Classifier and XGBoost Classifier are analyzed and compared based on the accuracy delivered by the models

Correction: Hydrophobic Core Variations Provide a Structural Framework for Tyrosine Kinase Evolution and Functional Specialization.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1005885.]

Pleiotropic Roles of a Ribosomal Protein in Dictyostelium discoideum

The cell cycle phase at starvation influences post-starvation differentiation and morphogenesis in Dictyostelium discoideum. We found that when expressed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a D. discoideum cDNA that encodes the ribosomal protein S4 (DdS4) rescues mutations in the cell cycle genes cdc24, cdc42 and bem1. The products of these genes affect morphogenesis in yeast via a coordinated moulding of the cytoskeleton during bud site selection. D. discoideum cells that over- or under-expressed DdS4 did not show detectable changes in protein synthesis but displayed similar developmental aberrations whose intensity was graded with the extent of over- or under-expression. This suggested that DdS4 might influence morphogenesis via a stoichiometric effect – specifically, by taking part in a multimeric complex similar to the one involving Cdc24p, Cdc42p and Bem1p in yeast. In support of the hypothesis, the S. cerevisiae proteins Cdc24p, Cdc42p and Bem1p as well as their D. discoideum cognates could be co-precipitated with antibodies to DdS4. Computational analysis and mutational studies explained these findings: a C-terminal domain of DdS4 is the functional equivalent of an SH3 domain in the yeast scaffold protein Bem1p that is central to constructing the bud site selection complex. Thus in addition to being part of the ribosome, DdS4 has a second function, also as part of a multi-protein complex. We speculate that the existence of the second role can act as a safeguard against perturbations to ribosome function caused by spontaneous variations in DdS4 levels