Application of nanotechnology in antimicrobial finishing of biomedical textiles

In recent years, the antimicrobial nanofinishing of biomedical textiles has become a very active, high-growth research field, assuming great importance among all available material surface modifications in the textile industry. This review offers the opportunity to update and critically discuss the latest advances and applications in this field. The survey suggests an emerging new paradigm in the production and distribution of nanoparticles for biomedical textile applications based on non-toxic renewable biopolymers such as chitosan, alginate and starch. Moreover, a relationship among metal and metal oxide nanoparticle (NP) size, its concentration on the fabric, and the antimicrobial activity exists, allowing the optimization of antimicrobial functionality.Andrea Zille (C2011-UMINHO-2C2T-01) acknowledges funding from Programa Compromisso para a Ciencia 2008, Portugal

A Randomized Controlled Trial to Evaluate the Effects of Magnetized Water Oral Rinsing on Salivary pH, Salivary Flow Rate and Colony Count of Streptococcus Mutans in Healthy Individuals

BACKGROUND: Health starts from the mouth. Having good oral health is the best initiation for general health and well-being of our body. This study is to evaluate the effect of magnetized water oral rinsing on salivary pH, salivary flow rate, and streptococcus mutan colony count in healthy individuals. This study concludes that magnetized water can be used as a product that helps to maintain good oral health. METHODS: A total of 50 subjects were randomly assigned into two groups as study group (n=25) and control group (n=25) after satisfying the selection criteria. Study group underwent magnetized water oral rinsing for 2 minutes per day in morning and control group used normal water for their oral rinsing of 2 minutes daily. Salivary pH, salivary flow rate, and streptococcus mutan colony count were collected before and after 2 weeks of magnetized water oral rinsing. RESULTS: The study showed significant changes in study group, means reduction in streptococcus mutan colony count in between group analysis and increase in salivary flow rate within the group analysis. CONCLUSION: Based on this study it is concluded that magnetized water could be used as effective mouth wash against Streptococcus mutan and Xerostomia

IMMUNOMODULATORY EFFECTS OF HEMAGGLUTINATING LECTINS FROM POTATO (SOLANUM TUBEROSUM) AND GARLIC (ALLIUM SATIVUM) ON HUMAN AND MURINE LYMPHOCYTES

Objective: Potato (Solanum tuberosum) and garlic (Allium sativum) are an important ubiquitously consumed dietary components and known to contain lectins, with potent and diverse biological functions. Present study aims to evaluate the mitogenicity and immunomodulatory potential of these lectins on human and murine lymphocytes.Methods: The lectin activity of raw and heat processed extracts along with purified proteins were confirmed by heamagglutination and glycoprotein binding assays. MTT assay employed to evaluate the mitogenic and cytotoxic potential. Nitric oxide and NBT assays were performed for NO and ROS induction from lymphocytes and macrophages respectively.Results: Raw and heat processed extracts of potato and garlic induced heamagglutination and demonstrated binding affinity to glycoproteins. Potato lectin was identified as pan agglutinin whereas garlic lectins, were blood group specific with differential glycan recognition. Garlic extracts and lectins (ASAs) exhibited a strong mitogenicity towards human and murine lymphocytes. The proliferation index for ASA I (70-75%) and ASA II (35-40%) are comparable to those of the reference mitogens. However, Potato extracts and lectin (STA) was non-mitogenic and found cytotoxic for both human and murine lymphocytes. Raw garlic extract showed a significant increase in ROS generation. Both potato and garlic lectins failed to induce ROS from macrophages and nitric oxide (NO) from human PBLs.Conclusions: Both potato and garlic lectins were capable of interacting with cell surface glycoproteins and it is evident that the garlic lectins have stimulatory effect whereas the potato lectin has an inhibitory effect on lymphocyte proliferation. There by, study indicates that garlic lectins are mitogenic and co-mitogenic, whereas potato lectin is non-mitogenic or anti-mitogenic in nature.Â

Investigation of Interfacial Charge Transfer in Solution Processed Cs2SnI6 Thin Films

Cesium tin halide based perovskite Cs2SnI6 has been subjected to in-depth investigations owing to its potentiality toward the realization of environment benign Pb free and stable solar cells. In spite of the fact that Cs2SnI6 has been successfully utilized as an efficient hole transport material owing to its p-type semiconducting nature, however, the nature of the majority carrier is still under debate. Therefore, intrinsic properties of Cs2SnI6 have been investigated in detail to explore its potentiality as light absorber along with facile electron and hole transport. A high absorption coefficient (5 × 104 cm–1) at 700 nm indicates the penetration depth of 700 nm light to be 0.2 μm, which is comparable to conventional Pb based solar cells. Preparation of pure and CsI impurity free dense thin films with controllable thicknesses of Cs2SnI6 by the solution processable method has been reported to be difficult owing to its poor solubility. An amicable solution to circumvent such problems of Cs2SnI6 has been provided utilizing spray-coating in combination with spin-coating. The presence of two emission peaks at 710 and 885 nm in the prepared Cs2SnI6 thin films indicated coexistence of quantum dot and bulk parts which were further supported by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) investigations. Time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) and transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS) were employed to investigate the excitation carrier lifetime, which revealed fast decay kinetics in the picoseconds (ps) to nanoseconds (ns) time domains. Time-resolved microwave photoconductivity decay (MPCD) measurement provided the mobile charge carrier lifetime exceeding 300 ns, which was also in agreement with the nanosecond transient absorption spectroscopy (ns-TAS) indicating slow charge decay lasting up to 20 μs. TA assisted interfacial charge transfer investigations utilizing Cs2SnI6 in combination with n-type PCBM and p-type P3HT exhibited both intrinsic electron and hole transport

A comparative and comprehensive study of prediction of Parkinson’s disease

Objectives: Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a form of neurodegenerative disease that is caused the progressive weakening of dopaminergic nerve cells that affects a large number of people around the world.  The event of recent treatment methods principally depends upon the experimental data resulting from assessment balances and patients’ journals that take varied boundaries with reference to legitimacy, inter-rater inconsistency, and incessant monitoring. Methods: Nowadays various techniques and algorithms are utilized in predicting the accuracy in PD. A range of those techniques, including SVM, Artificial Neural Network, Naive Bayes, Kernel based extreme learning through subtractive clustering landscapes, Random Forest, The Multi-Layer Perceptron with Back-Propagation Learning Algorithm are widely applied to form the acceptable decision accurately. During this work, and in-depth review was administered on various techniques proposed by numerous researchers. a replacement system must be proposed which uses DL techniques and considers other attributes of paralysis agitans which can improve the prediction and be an advancement within the medical field. Result: It has been observed that many researches have been done in identifying the PD yet there is a need of suitable method or algorithm to improve the prediction of PD which will help in the clinical management. Conclusion and Future work: Most of the methods have used speech as a major attribute for their research and have produced substantial accuracy. In order to increase the precision approaches involving movements, facial expression and other attributes also be considered for evaluatio

Formulation and evaluation of herbal face cream with green tea extract

Face cream is a semi-solid preparation for improving skin colour. The purposes of the present research work was to formulate and evaluate herbal face cream with green tea extract, turmeric, aloe vera gel as a skin toner. Herbal creams offer several advantages over synthetic creams. The majority of existing creams which has prepared from drugs of synthetic origin and gives extras fairness to face, but it has several side effects such as itching or several allergic reactions. Herbal creams do not have any of these side effects, without side effects it gives the nourishment to skin. Method carried out to prepare herbal cream was vanishing cream formulation. Firstly, oil phase was prepared, Secondly aqueous phase was prepared. Then aqueous phase was added into the oil phase at 700 c with continuous stirring. Now, once the transfer was completed it was allowed to come at room temperature all the while being stirred. Perfume was added at last just before the finished product was transferred to suitable container. The above prepared herbal cream was evaluated with parameters such as pH, homogeneity by visual and by touch, appearance (colour), rub out (spread ability, wetness), washability, consistency and emolliency. The study suggests that the composition of extract and the base of the cream F1 are more stable and safe

The Journey of HIV-1 Non-Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NNRTIs) from Lab to Clinic

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is now pandemic. Targeting HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (HIV-1 RT) has been considered as one of the most successful targets for the development of anti-HIV treatment. Among the HIV-1 RT inhibitors, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs) have gained a definitive place due to their unique antiviral potency, high specificity, and low toxicity in antiretroviral combination therapies used to treat HIV. Until now, &gt;50 structurally diverse classes of compounds have been reported as NNRTIs. Among them, six NNRTIs were approved for HIV-1 treatment, namely, nevirapine (NVP), delavirdine (DLV), efavirenz (EFV), etravirine (ETR), rilpivirine (RPV), and doravirine (DOR). In this perspective, we focus on the six NNRTIs and lessons learned from their journey through development to clinical studies. It demonstrates the obligatory need of understanding the physicochemical and biological principles (lead optimization), resistance mutations, synthesis, and clinical requirements for drugs.</p

An Integrated Pipeline of Open Source Software Adapted for Multi-CPU Architectures: Use in the Large-Scale Identification of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms

The large amounts of EST sequence data available from a single species of an organism as well as for several species within a genus provide an easy source of identification of intra- and interspecies single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In the case of model organisms, the data available are numerous, given the degree of redundancy in the deposited EST data. There are several available bioinformatics tools that can be used to mine this data; however, using them requires a certain level of expertise: the tools have to be used sequentially with accompanying format conversion and steps like clustering and assembly of sequences become time-intensive jobs even for moderately sized datasets. We report here a pipeline of open source software extended to run on multiple CPU architectures that can be used to mine large EST datasets for SNPs and identify restriction sites for assaying the SNPs so that cost-effective CAPS assays can be developed for SNP genotyping in genetics and breeding applications. At the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the pipeline has been implemented to run on a Paracel high-performance system consisting of four dual AMD Opteron processors running Linux with MPICH. The pipeline can be accessed through user-friendly web interfaces at http://hpc.icrisat.cgiar.org/PBSWeb and is available on request for academic use. We have validated the developed pipeline by mining chickpea ESTs for interspecies SNPs, development of CAPS assays for SNP genotyping, and confirmation of restriction digestion pattern at the sequence level

Neutrophil-Lymphocyte Ratio and Platelet-Lymphocyte Ratio as Biomarkers for Risk Stratification and Predictors of 90-day Mortality in Acute Pulmonary Embolism

Background: Acute Pulmonary Embolism (APE) is a critical cardiovascular emergency requiring timely risk stratification. Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio (NLR) and Platelet-to-Lymphocyte Ratio (PLR) are emerging inflammatory biomarkers that may enhance existing risk models, such as the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) guidelines.Objectives: To assess the prognostic value of NLR and PLR in predicting 90-day mortality in APE patients and their potential role in improving ESC risk stratification.Methods: A retrospective cohort study of 42 APE patients at Chettinad Hospital (2021-2024) was conducted. Clinical, laboratory, and radiological data were analyzed. Statistical tests, including logistic regression, were used to evaluate associations between NLR, PLR, and 90-day mortality.Results: The study included 42 patients (57.1% male, mean age 54.19 ± 15.98 years). Dyspnea (85.7%) and palpitations (54.8%) were the most common symptoms. Elevated NLR and PLR were significantly associated with higher mortality risk. Malignancy (p &lt; 0.001) and right ventricular dysfunction (p &lt; 0.001) were independent mortality predictors. Integrating NLR and PLR into the ESC model improved predictive accuracy with AUC of 0.848 as compared to only ESC stratification with AUC of 0.771.Conclusion: NLR and PLR are valuable biomarkers for APE risk stratification and mortality prediction. Their inclusion in ESC guidelines may refine prognostication, facilitating timely interventions. Prospective multicenter studies are needed for validation

Cotton based bioactive wound dressing material with high absorbency and antibacterial activity

63-68Cotton gauze fabrics with improved absorbency through yarn twist optimization and antimicrobial property using nanosilver have been prepared. The absorbency, mass loss (%), dehydration rate, wicking rate, surface morphology, surface chemical nature and antibacterial activity of cotton gauze fabrics have been evaluated. The gauze fabric with low twisted yarn shows better absorbency and vertical wicking rate as compared to that with higher twisted yarn. The cotton gauze fabric with optimized twist multiplier (3.0 TM) is then treated with silver nitrate precursor to form in-situ nanosilver on the surface of cotton by applying elevated pressure and temperature. The surface morphology has been studied by SEM and chemical nature by FTIR. The in-situ technique produces an average nanosilver particle size of 120 &plusmn; 48 nm and shows 100% reduction for Klebsiella pneumoniae (Gram-negative bacterium) and 99.99% for Staphylococcus aureus (Gram-positive bacterium)