Physico-chemical characterization of the essential oil of Origanum majorana (L.) cultivated in a semi-arid bioclimatic stage (South-east Algeria)

The essential oils (EO) are complex volatile natural compounds,  characterized by a strong odor, produced by the plants as secondary metabolites. The composition of these last is strongly influenced by intrinsic factors twinned with the extrinsic factors such as technology, the cultivation techniques, the édapho-climatic conditions of the culture  medium, like those of the storage of vegetable drug, the techniques of treatment, etc… The extraction of essential oils (EO) of marjoram (O. majorana), by the method of hydro-distillation made it possible to obtain an average essential oil yield of about 0.61% of which the density is low. The chemical characterization by gas chromatography highlighted the wealth of this oil in Bornéol (15.50%) and Cineol (11.33%).Keywords: essential oil (EO); O. majorana L.; cineol; bornéol; Gas chromatography; secondary metabolite

Alvira : comparative genomics of viral strains

The Alvira tool is a general purpose multiple sequence alignment viewer with a special emphasis on the comparative analysis of viral genomes. This new tool has been devised specifically to address the problem of the simultaneous analysis of a large number of viral strains. The multiple alignment is embedded in a graph that can be explored at different levels of resolution

DRUG POLYMORPHISM IDENTIFICATION USING FOURIER TRANSFORM-RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LAMIVUDINE AND FINASTERIDE DRUGS

Objectives: Maintaining the quality of the pharmaceutical drug product during its shelf life is highly desirable. The crystalline form of the drug having the great thermodynamic stability is essential for the manufacturers in pharmaceutical industry in view of their profit and also for the safety of the customer. Many pharmaceutical drugs have the tendency to exhibit polymorphism which is unwanted for pharmaceutical companies, where they have experienced market shortages due to these unpredicted polymorphic and/or pseudomorphic changes. The property of a drug exhibiting more than one crystal form is considerably regarded as polymorphism and each of the crystalline form has its own physicochemical properties, namely, solubility, heat capacity, melting point, and sublimation point. To relieve this ultimate effect on the drug quality and stability, a prior detection of polymorphism in the final dosage form is highly recommended. Hence, many analytical techniques have been proposed for the detection of polymorphism in pharmaceutical drug products. Methods: Fourier transform (FT)-Raman spectrometer is used for the investigation of drug polymorphism and the instrument is advanced with charge coupled device detectors, ease of sample preparation and handling, mitigation of sub-sampling problems using different geometric laser irradiance patterns and having different optical components of Raman spectrometers. Results: In this work, we carefully studied the Raman spectral patterns for Lamivudine as well as Finasteride drug substances for the detection of polymorphism. Further, we have highlighted the advantages of FT-Raman spectroscopy over other polymorphism detection techniques. For example, Raman spectra showed invariably sharp, well resolved bands compare to IR spectra due to the minor contribution of overtone vibrations in Raman spectra, resulting in much less broadening and a better resolution of bands. Besides, Raman spectroscopy does not suffer from the sampling problems that are common in X-ray powder diffraction, where preferred orientation and specimen displacements are serious restrictions for the application of quantitative method. Conclusion: Here, in this paper, we are presented and compared the experimental results regarding the detection of polymorphism in Lamivudine and Finasteride drugs using FT-Raman spectroscopy, to illustrate the advantages of the technique in the detection of polymorphism over other techniques

C1: Uses of Administrative Data for Supporting Education Policy

Moderator: Katie Barghaus Presenters: Sonya R. Porter: Demonstrating the Use of Linked Data to Advance Education Research Chenna Reddy Cotla: Heterogeneous causal effects of perception of school safety on absenteeism and performance: A causal decision tree approach using administrative and survey data from a large school district Sally Wallace: Returns to Late Aged College Degrees Douglas Lauen: Early College High Schools at Scale: Using Administrative Data to Assess the Impacts of an Educational Intervention on Voting and Crime Wesley Greenblatt: Long-Term Effects from Early Exposure to Research: Evidence from the NIH \u27Yellow Berets\u2

Two primate-specific small non-protein-coding RNAs in transgenic mice: neuronal expression, subcellular localization and binding partners

In a rare occasion a single chromosomal locus was targeted twice by independent Alu-related retroposon insertions, and in both cases supported neuronal expression of the respective inserted genes encoding small non-protein coding RNAs (npcRNAs): BC200 RNA in anthropoid primates and G22 RNA in the Lorisoidea branch of prosimians. To avoid primate experimentation, we generated transgenic mice to study neuronal expression and protein binding partners for BC200 and G22 npcRNAs. The BC200 gene, with sufficient upstream flanking sequences, is expressed in transgenic mouse brain areas comparable to those in human brain, and G22 gene, with upstream flanks, has a similar expression pattern. However, when all upstream regions of the G22 gene were removed, expression was completely abolished, despite the presence of intact internal RNA polymerase III promoter elements. Transgenic BC200 RNA is transported into neuronal dendrites as it is in human brain. G22 RNA, almost twice as large as BC200 RNA, has a similar subcellular localization. Both transgenically expressed npcRNAs formed RNP complexes with poly(A) binding protein and the heterodimer SRP9/14, as does BC200 RNA in human. These observations strongly support the possibility that the independently exapted npcRNAs have similar functions, perhaps in translational regulation of dendritic protein biosynthesis in neurons of the respective primates

iCODEHOP: a new interactive program for designing COnsensus-DEgenerate Hybrid Oligonucleotide Primers from multiply aligned protein sequences

PCR amplification using COnsensus DEgenerate Hybrid Oligonucleotide Primers (CODEHOPs) has proven to be highly effective for identifying unknown pathogens and characterizing novel genes. We describe iCODEHOP; a new interactive web application that simplifies the process of designing and selecting CODEHOPs from multiply-aligned protein sequences. iCODEHOP intelligently guides the user through the degenerate primer design process including uploading sequences, creating a multiple alignment, deriving CODEHOPs and calculating their annealing temperatures. The user can quickly scan over an entire set of degenerate primers designed by the program to assess their relative quality and select individual primers for further analysis. The program displays phylogenetic information for input sequences and allows the user to easily design new primers from selected sequence sub-clades. It also allows the user to bias primer design to favor specific clades or sequences using sequence weights. iCODEHOP is freely available to all interested researchers at https://icodehop.cphi.washington.edu/i-codehop-context/Welcome

Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

Penicillium menonorum, a new species related to P. pimiteouiense

Penicillium menonorum is described as a new monoverticillate, non-vesiculate species that resembles P. restrictum and P. pimiteouiense. On the basis of phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences from four loci, P. menonorum occurs in a clade with P. pimiteouiense, P. vinaceum, P. guttulosum, P. rubidurum, and P. parvum. Genealogical concordance analysis was applied to P. pimiteouiense and P. parvum, substantiating the phenotypically defined species. The species P. rubidurum, P. guttulosum, and P. menonorum were on distinct branches statistically excluded from inclusion in other species and have distinct phenotypes

PHY·FI: fast and easy online creation and manipulation of phylogeny color figures

BACKGROUND: The need to depict a phylogeny, or some other kind of abstract tree, is very frequently experienced by researchers from a broad range of biological and computational disciplines. Thousands of papers and talks include phylogeny figures, and often during everyday work, one would like to quickly get a graphical display of, e.g., the phylogenetic relationship between a set of sequences as calculated by an alignment program such as ClustalW or the phylogenetic package Phylip. A wealth of software tools capable of tree drawing exists; most are comprehensive packages that also perform various types of analysis, and hence they are available only for download and installing. Some online tools exist, too. RESULTS: This paper presents an online tool, PHY·FI, which encompasses all the qualities of existing online programs and adds functionality to hopefully eliminate the need for post-processing the phylogeny figure in some other general-purpose graphics program. PHY·FI is versatile, easy-to-use and fast, and supports comprehensive graphical control, several download image formats, and the possibility of dynamically collapsing groups of nodes into named subtrees (e.g. "Primates"). The user can create a color figure from any phylogeny, or other kind of tree, represented in the widely used parenthesized Newick format. CONCLUSION: PHY·FI is fast and easy to use, yet still offers full color control, tree manipulation, and several image formats. It does not require any downloading and installing, and thus any internet user regardless of computer skills, and computer platform, can benefit from it. PHY·FI is free for all and is available from this web address