Mannose-rich guar gum nanoparticles as a novel therapeutic drug against inflammatory diseases

The potential to deliver nanoparticles, like polymer-based nanoparticles that can be enriched with functional groups to ensure entry into cells, directly into targeted cells is important for the therapy of inflammatory diseases. Plant-derived nanoparticles, with inherent anti-inflammatory activity and modified to allow receptor-mediated uptake, can be used as effective therapy with minimal side effects. The particle used in this study is an edible polysaccharide, derived from Cyamopsis tetragonoloba, with a galactomannan component. The particle was made mannose-rich to increase specificity towards cells expressing mannose receptors, and initially tagged with rhodamine isothiocyanate to trace its path. This study aimed to determine the therapeutic effect of the guar gum nanoparticle (GN) in vitro and in vivo in inflammatory diseases. In vitro studies on RAW 264.7 cells showed successful uptake of the nanoparticle, in a short duration of time, via their mannose receptors. Nitric oxide and MTS assays showed anti-inflammatory effects of GN. In vivo mouse model of thioglycollate-induced peritonitis showed significant decrease in inflammation, indicating its anti-inflammatory effect, and increase in clonogenic potential, indicating its regenerative potential, on intraperitoneal administration of GN. The results reflect the potential of the nanoparticle in cellular trafficking, site- specific drug delivery and bioimaging applications

PNEUMOCOCCAL BIOFILMS AND THEIR INTERVENTION STRATEGIES

Pneumonia is a fatal infection with hard time breathing, cough, and fever. The children are at high risk worldwide due to pneumonia. This is responsible for childhood mortality and morbidity worldwide. It is mainly caused by bacteria. Pneumonia-causing bacteria are resistant to most of the antibiotics and therapeutic agents due to the formation of biofilms. Laboratories around the world are trying to develop strategies to combat pneumococcal biofilms. This review deals with the formation of pneumococcal biofilms and their different intervention strategies.Â

An overview of traditional rice beer of North-east India: ethnic preparation, challenges and prospects

744-757Fermented drinks are always found to be connected with the culture and existence of the ethnic tribes throughout the world. Traditional rice beer of North-east India is an indispensible part of tribal life style attached culturally and religiously with them. There are more than 150 major tribes in Northeast India and almost all are having a traditional way of preparing rice beer from time immemorial. The present paper is a comparative review on the methods of preparing rice beer by some popular tribes of Northeastern India. The methodology they use is found to be unique in many senses from rest of the world. The uniqueness not only lies in the starter culture preparation, which is the prime source of yeast but also in the other ingredients like indigenous plant species and rice varieties used as substrate resulting variation in taste and aroma. Almost all the traditional rice beer has unique soothing taste, aroma, colour and nutritional as well as therapeutic values having significant role in their socio cultural lives. In the present scenario the tradition is fading and facing lots of challenges. But, still the traditional rice beer has got lots of scope for its scientific up-gradation and commercialization

Chemical and Biological Explorations of the Family of CC-1065 and the Duocarmycin Natural Products.

yesCC-1065, the duocarmycins and yatakemycin are members of a family of ultrapotent antitumour antibiotics that have been the subject of extensive investigations due to their mode of action and potential in the design of new anticancer therapeutics. The natural products and their analogues exert their effects through a sequence selective alkylation of duplex DNA in the minor groove at the N3 of adenine. An understanding of their structure and its effect on biological activity has been derived through chemical synthesis and has also generated new potential lead compounds. These studies form the first section of the review. The desire to progress these compounds to clinic has also led to studies of bioconjugation and prodrug formation and this is discussed in the second section of the review. The combination of synthesis with key biological experiments is a powerful tool to define the requirements for the development of natural products as potential therapeutic agents. The studies described herein form an excellent paradigm for the study and development of other natural products.EPSRC, Yorkshire Cancer Research, Big C Cancer Research, UCB Pharm

Role of Interleukin-18 in Thyroid tumorigenesis

Purpose: Although the significance of Interleukin-18 (IL-18) has been studied in pathogenesis of different cancers including, ovarian, gastric, breast, lung carcinoma and melanoma, its role in thyroid cancer- the most common endocrine malignancy has not yet been looked at extensively. Hence, this study intended to examine the role of IL-18 in thyroid tumorigenesis.Methods: Sixty seven patients with benign thyroid diseases and 106 thyroid cancer patients (including 83 papillary, 6 follicular, 9 medullary and 8 anaplastic thyroid carcinoma patients) were enrolled in the study. To accomplish the aim, the circulating levels of IL-18 were estimated by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) from all patients and compared with controls. Further, protein expression of IL-18 was determined from the primary tumors of the patients using immunohistochemistry.Results: It was observed that the circulating levels of IL-18 were significantly higher in all patients: benign thyroid diseases (p = 0.006), papillary (p < 0.001), follicular (p = 0.023), medullary (p = 0.002) and anaplastic thyroid cancer (p < 0.001) than the controls. In addition to this, IL-18 could well discriminate papillary (AUC = 0.627, p =0.008) and anaplastic thyroid carcinoma patients (AUC = 0.777, p = 0.011) from patients with benign thyroid diseases. However, the difference between tumoral protein expression of IL-18 in patients with benign thyroid diseases and thyroid carcinoma was not significant. The Kaplan - Meier survival analysis revealed that neither the circulating nor the tumoral protein expression of IL-18 was the significant predictor of disease free survival (DFS) or overall survival (OS) in papillary thyroid cancer patients.Conclusion: Though not a significant prognosticator, circulating IL-18 may be useful as a differentiating factor in thyroid tumorigenesis and the increase in serum IL-18 levels may be provoked in response to the tumor. Thus, including IL-18 along with the current treatment practice may have a significant role in better management of the disease. However, further exploration of this interleukin is required in a larger series of patients with longer follow up period

Mosquito larvicidal activities of Solanum villosum berry extract against the dengue vector Stegomyia aegypti

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Vector control is facing a threat due to the emergence of resistance to synthetic insecticides. Insecticides of botanical origin may serve as suitable alternative biocontrol techniques in the future. Although several plants have been reported for mosquitocidal activity, only a few botanicals have moved from the laboratory to field use, because they are poorly characterized, in most cases active principals are not determined and most of the works are restricted to preliminary screening. <it>Solanum villosum </it>is a common weed distributed in many parts of India with medicinal properties, but the larvicidal activity of this plant has not been reported so far.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Aqueous and polar/non-polar solvent extract of fresh, mature, green berries of <it>S. villosum </it>was tested against <it>Stegomyia aegypti</it>, a common vector of dengue fever. A phytochemical analysis of chloroform:methanol extract was performed to search for the active toxic ingredient. The lethal concentration was determined (log probit analysis) and compared with Malathion. The chemical nature of the active substance was also evaluated following ultraviolet-visual (UV-Vis) and infrared (IR) analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In a 72 hour bioassay experiment with the aqueous extract, the highest mortality was recorded in 0.5% extract. When the mortality of different solvent extracts was compared, the maximum (<it>p </it>< 0.05) mortality was recorded at a concentration of 50 ppm of chloroform:methanol extract (1:1, v/v). The larvicidal activity was lower when compared with the chemical insecticide, Malathion (<it>p </it>< 0.05). Results of regression analysis revealed that the mortality rate (<it>Y</it>) was positively correlated with the period of exposure (<it>X</it>) and the log probit analysis (95% confidence level) recorded lowest value (5.97 ppm) at 72 hours of exposure. Phytochemical analysis of the chlororm:methanol extract reported the presence of many bioactive phytochemicals. Two toxic compounds were detected having <it>R</it>_f= 0.82 (70% and 73.33% mortality in 24 and 48 hours, respectively) and <it>R</it>_f= 0.95 (40% and 50% mortality in 24 and 48 hours, respectively). IR analysis provided preliminary information about the steroidal nature of the active ingredient.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p><it>S. villosum </it>offers promise as potential bio control agent against <it>S. aegypti </it>particularly in its markedly larvicidal effect. The extract or isolated bioactive phytochemical could be used in stagnant water bodies for the control of mosquitoes acting as vector for many communicable diseases.</p

Culture-level dimensions of social axioms and their correlates across 41 cultures

Leung and colleagues have revealed a five-dimensional structure of social axioms across individuals from five cultural groups. The present research was designed to reveal the culture level factor structure of social axioms and its correlates across 41 nations. An ecological factor analysis on the 60 items of the Social Axioms Survey extracted two factors: Dynamic Externality correlates with value measures tapping collectivism, hierarchy, and conservatism and with national indices indicative of lower social development. Societal Cynicism is less strongly and broadly correlated with previous values measures or other national indices and seems to define a novel cultural syndrome. Its national correlates suggest that it taps the cognitive component of a cultural constellation labeled maleficence, a cultural syndrome associated with a general mistrust of social systems and other people. Discussion focused on the meaning of these national level factors of beliefs and on their relationships with individual level factors of belief derived from the same data set.(undefined

The nation and its discourse: India and the crisis of modernity in the 1980s

My dissertation examines the decade of the 1980s in India, which witnessed major upheavals. The dominant mood in the country was one of pessimism about the goals of modernization. The violence, that affected all Indians, was repeatedly taken up in the media and the arts as it questioned India\u27s viability as a nation and the discourse through which India had imagined itself since independence. Through an analysis of fictional and journalistic narratives published in the 1980s, I examine the ways in which the crisis of a national discourse is represented in Indian texts of the period. This crisis manifests itself in tensions over the choice of a national language, over resource allocations between villages and cities, over struggles between minority and mainstream cultures, and over the erasure of women in nation-building activities. I study four works of fiction that typically represent this period: Anita Desai\u27s In Custody (1984), Mahasweta Devi\u27s Imaginary Maps (1989), Upamanyu Chatterjee\u27s English August: An Indian Story (1988), and Partap Sharma\u27s The Days of the Turban (1986). I read these works in counterpoint to news and journal articles in English on similar issues. These narratives, written and read by the middle-class in an attempt to normalize its vision of the nation, fail in crucial moments when they encounter the marginalized. My dissertation examines these failures through textual ruptures, which reveal challenges to bourgeois power. My choice of these narratives is also conditioned by the fact that they foreground the conflictual status of English in India. English, though attacked as an agent of continuing cultural imperialism, is deeply entrenched in India. The writer in English has access to a middle-class, pan-Indian audience, which is also the recipient of the bourgeois values associated class, pan-Indian audience, which is also the recipient of the bourgeois values associated with the liberal, humanist vision of a modern, scientific nation. Narratives in English are therefore the site for examining the process by which such a vision is (de)constructed

Super-resolution reconstruction of reservoir saturation map with physical constraints using generative adversarial network

Complete physics-based numerical simulations currently provide the most accurate approach for predicting fluid flow behavior in geological reservoirs. However, the amount of computational resources required to perform these simulations increase exponentially with the increase in resolution to the point that they are infeasible. Therefore, a common practice is to upscale the reservoir model to reduce the resolution such that numerous simulations, as required, can be performed within a reasonable time. The problem we are trying to solve here is that the simulation results from these upscaled models, although they provide a zoomed-out and global view of the reservoir dynamics, however, they lack a detailed zoomed-in view of a local region in the reservoir, which is required to take actionable decisions. This work proposes using super-resolution techniques, recently developed using machine learning methods, to obtain fine-scale flow behavior given flow behavior from a low-resolution simulation of an upscaled-reservoir model. We demonstrate our model on a two-phase, deal-oil, and heterogenous oil reservoir, and we reconstruct the oil saturation map of the reservoir. We also demonstrate how the network can be trained using dynamic coarse geological properties at various resolutions. The findings imply that even when coarse geological features and with limited resolution, the super-resolution reconstructions are able to recreate missing information that is close to the ground facts