Recent Advances on Design and Synthesis of Chiral Imidazolium Ionic Liquids and their Applications in Green Asymmetric Synthesis

Over the past decade, catalysis by ionic liquids (ILs) has experienced a tremendous growth in the context of “Green Chemistryâ€, and there are numerous examples of a variety of catalytic reactions that have been successfully carried out in such neoteric media.The great enthusiasm for catalysis in ILs is not only driven by the curiosity of chemists, but also due to the growing awareness of developing greener reactions or process media in catalytic science and greener catalytic technologies due their advantages of unique physical and chemical properties as compared to traditional volatile organic solvents.Recently, development of chiral ionic liquids and their applications in asymmetric synthesis have attracted much attention as these reactions have widespread applications in the synthesis of chiral drugs and pharmaceutical industries. Asymmetric induction is mainly achieved by the use of chiral substrates or reagents, chiral catalysts or enzymes. Owing to the vast number of structurally different room temperature ILS that have been synthesized, this review focuses on imidazolium ionic liquids that possess chirality either in the imidazolium moiety or in the anion moiety. The aim of this review is to highlight the recent breakthrough of Chiral ILs in chirality transfer or chiral recognition when used as solvent or co-solvent: the case of task specific ionic liquids is beyond the scope of this review. In the first part, the synthesis of of CILs has been presented and the second part of the review has been devoted on the applications of such CILs in green asymmetric synthesis as well as various pharmaceutical industries

Plant Disease Detection using Ensembled CNN Framework

Agriculture exhibits the prime driving force for growth of agro-based economies globally. In the field of agriculture, detecting and preventing crops from attacks of pests is the major concern in today's world. Early detection of plant disease becomes necessary to prevent the degradation in the yield of crop production. In this paper, we propose an ensemble based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture that detects plant disease from the images of the leaves of the plant. The proposed architecture takes into account CNN architectures like VGG-19, ResNet-50, and InceptionV3 as its base models, and the prediction from these models is used as an input for our meta-model (Inception-ResNetV2). The approach helped us in building a generalized model for disease detection with an accuracy of 97.9 % under test conditions

The Modulation of Apoptotic Pathways by Gammaherpesviruses

Apoptosis or programmed cell death is a tightly regulated process fundamental for cellular development and elimination of damaged or infected cells during the maintenance of cellular homeostasis. It is also an important cellular defense mechanism against viral invasion. In many instances, abnormal regulation of apoptosis has been associated with a number of diseases, including cancer development. Following infection of host cells, persistent and oncogenic viruses such as the members of the Gammaherpesvirus family employ a number of different mechanisms to avoid the host cell’s burglar alarm and to alter the extrinsic and intrinsic apoptotic pathways by either deregulating the expressions of cellular signaling genes or by encoding the viral homologues of cellular genes. In this review, we summarize the recent findings on how gammaherpesviruses inhibit cellular apoptosis via virus-encoded proteins by mediating modification of numerous signal transduction pathways. We also list the key viral anti-apoptotic proteins that could be exploited as effective targets for novel antiviral therapies in order to stimulate apoptosis in different types of cancer cells

Chronic garlic administration protects rat heart against oxidative stress induced by ischemic reperfusion injury

BACKGROUND: Oxidative stress plays a major role in the biochemical and pathological changes associated with myocardial ischemic-reperfusion injury (IRI). The need to identify agents with a potential for preventing such damage has assumed great importance. Chronic oral administration of raw garlic has been previously reported to augment myocardial endogenous antioxidants. In the present study, the effect of chronic oral administration of raw garlic homogenate on oxidative stress induced by ischemic-reperfusion injury in isolated rat heart was investigated. RESULTS: Raw garlic homogenate (125, 250 and 500 mg/kg once daily for 30 days) was administered orally in Wistar albino rats. Thereafter, hearts were isolated and subjected to IRI (9 min. of global ischemia, followed by 12 min of reperfusion; perfusion with K-H buffer solution; 37°C, 60 mm Hg.). Significant myocyte injury and rise in myocardial TBARS along with reduction in myocardial SOD, catalase, GSH and GPx were observed following IRI. Depletion of myocardial endogenous antioxidants and rise in TBARS were significantly less in the garlic-treated rat hearts. Oxidative stress induced cellular damage as indicated by ultrastructural changes, like disruption of myofilament, Z-band architecture along with mitochondrial changes were significantly less. CONCLUSIONS: The study strongly suggests that chronic garlic administration prevents oxidative stress and associated ultrastructural changes, induced by myocardial ischemic-reperfusion injury

Metagenomic analysis unveils the microbial landscape of pancreatic tumors

The composition of resident microbes in the human body is linked to various diseases and their treatment outcomes. Although studies have identified pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC)-associated bacterial communities in the oral and gut samples, herein, we hypothesize that the prevalence of microbiota in pancreatic tumor tissues is different as compared with their matched adjacent, histologically normal appearing tissues, and these microbial molecular signatures can be highly useful for PDAC diagnosis/prognosis. In this study, we performed comparative profiling of bacterial populations in pancreatic tumors and their respective adjacent normal tissues using 16S rRNA-based metagenomics analysis. This study revealed a higher abundance of Proteobacteria and Actinomycetota in tumor tissues compared with adjacent normal tissues. Interestingly, the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) scores unambiguously revealed an enrichment of Delftia in tumor tissues, whereas Sphingomonas, Streptococcus, and Citrobacter exhibited a depletion in tumor tissues. Furthermore, we analyzed the microbial composition between different groups of patients with different tumor differentiation stages. The bacterial genera, Delftia and Staphylococcus, were very high at the G1 stages (well differentiated) compared with G2 (well to moderate/moderately differentiated) and G3/G4 (poorly differentiated) stages. However, the abundance of Actinobacter and Cloacibacterium was found to be very high in G2 and G3, respectively. Additionally, we evaluated the correlation of programmed death-ligand (PDL1) expression with the abundance of bacterial genera in tumor lesions. Our results indicated that three genera such as Streptomyces, Cutibacterium, and Delftia have a positive correlation with PD-L1 expression. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that PDAC lesions harbor relatively different microbiota compared with their normal tumor adjacent tissues, and this information may be helpful for the diagnosis and prognosis of PADC patients

PAMAM Dendrimers as Promising Nanocarriers for RNAi Therapeutics

Therapeutics based on RNA interference mechanisms are highly promising for the management of several diseases including multi-drug resistant cancers. However, effective delivery of siRNAs and oligonucleotides still remains challenging. In this regard, hyper-branched, PAMAM dendrimers having unique three-dimensional architecture and nanoscale size, with cationic surface charge can potentially serve as siRNA condensing agents as well as robust nano-vectors for targeted delivery. In addition, their surface functionality permits conjugation of drugs and genes or development of hybrid systems for combination therapy. Thus far, in vitro cellular testing of dendrimer-mediated siRNA delivery has revealed great potential, with reports on their in vivo effectiveness starting to appear. These favorable outcomes portend a promising future for dendrimer mediated RNAi therapeutics

Self-Dual Supersymmetric Dirac-Born-Infeld Action

We present a self-dual N=1 supersymmetric Dirac-Born-Infeld action in three dimensions. This action is based on the supersymmetric generalized self-duality in odd dimensions developed originally by Townsend, Pilch and van Nieuwenhuizen. Even though such a self-duality had been supposed to be very difficult to generalize to a supersymmetrically interacting system, we show that Dirac-Born-Infeld action is actually compatible with supersymmetry and self-duality in three-dimensions. The interactions can be further generalized to arbitrary (non)polynomial interactions. As a by-product, we also show that a third-rank field strength leads to a more natural formulation of self-duality in 3D. We also show an interesting role played by the third-rank field strength leading to a supersymmetry breaking, in addition to accommodating a Chern-Simons form.Comment: 12 pages, no figure

Growth and Characterization of Single Crystals ofl-Histidine Hydrochloride Monohydrate for Nonlinear Optical Applications

In the present study, we have focused on the growth of semi-organic single crystals, as they play a vital role in the generation of a terahertz pulse and its potential applications. The single crystals ofl-histidine hydrochloride monohydrate (LMHCL) were grown by slow evaporation solution growth by using deionized water as a solvent in a controlled atmosphere. Good quality crystals of the required size were obtained within 2 weeks. To estimate the lattice dimensions and get the structural information, powder x-ray diffraction (PXRD) study was performed in which we have found that the crystal belongs to the orthorhombic crystal system with space groupP2(1)2(1)2(1). The functional groups and the corresponding vibrational mode were confirmed using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy, respectively. To study the optical properties UV-Vis transmission spectrum and photoluminescence (PL) were recorded. It was observed that the single crystal has a high value of transmission over a long range of wavelength which signifies that the crystal is a good candidate for nonlinear optical (NLO) applications. The UV cut-off wavelength is found to be 236 nm. The grown single crystals were studied by time-domain terahertz spectroscopy (THz-TDS) for photonic applications and the refractive indices were calculated and it is found that the refractive index is nearly equal to 3.4