Multiobjective dynamic optimization of an industrial nylon 6 semibatch reactor using genetic algorithm

The nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA) is adapted and used to obtain multiobjective Pareto optimal solutions for three grades of nylon 6 being produced in an industrial semibatch reactor. The total reaction time and the concentration of an undesirable cyclic dimer in the product are taken as two individual objectives for minimization, while simultaneously requiring the attainment of design values of the final monomer conversion and for the number-average chain length. Substantial improvements in the operation of the nylon 6 reactor are indicated by this study. The technique used is very general in nature and can be used for multiobjective optimization of other reactors. Good mathematical models accounting for all the physicochemical aspects operative in a reactor (and which have been preferably tested on industrial data) are a prerequisite for such optimization studies

Estimation of prevalence of multidrug resistance in spinal tuberculosis, antibiotic susceptibility patterns and clinical outcomes

Background: There are no adequate data in literature referring to the early diagnosis and treatment (especially surgical) of MDR tuberculosis of spine and evaluation of its clinical outcome. We aimed to address this lacunae, by using gene expert test (CBNAAT) and drug sensitivity/susceptibility tests (DST) and by studying subsequent actual clinical outcomes.Methods: Forty patients with clinico-radiological scenario of spinal tuberculosis were evaluated using biochemical, radiological and histo-pathological studies. Anti-tuberculosis treatment was empirically started based on initial clinico-radiological suspicion of spinal tuberculosis. All tissue specimen and intra-operative samples were subjected to CBNAAT, MGIT culture and histopathological examination. Culture of those samples which showed rifampicin resistance on CBNAAT were followed up for DST (Drug Susceptibility Test) and the treatment modified accordingly, if required. All cases were followed up at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months interval.Results: Out of 40 patients, mycobacterium tuberculosis was detected in 23 patients by CBNAAT. Out of these 23 cases, 20 showed mycobacterium tuberculosis sensitivity to rifampicin and 3 were resistant. Out of these 3 cases, one had culture positive. Sensitivity and negative predictive value of gene expert test in comparison with the culture were 100%. Specificity and positive predictive value were calculated at 58.6% and 47.8% respectively. Accuracy of gene expert in our study was found to be 70%.Conclusions: Early detection of MDR spinal tuberculosis using highly sensitive CBNAAT test would be helpful to avoid consequences of inappropriate chemotherapy and would result in favourable outcomes

Serum Lysozyme Pattern and Hematological Changes in the Host During Growth of a Transplantable Murine Lymphoma

The serum lysozyme concentrations were determined in the host mice bearing a transplantable ascitic lymphoma during growth of the tumour. Simultaneously, the hematological changes were also recorded. These ob-servations were made at weekly intervals till the animals survived and were made at weekly intervals till the animals survived and were compared with their normal counterparts. It has been shown that there is a progressive increase in the concentration of lysozyme along with the growth of the tumour cells within the peritoneal cavity which reaches a peak on the third week following transplantation of tumour cells and then falls off. The con-centration of the enzyme, however, never reaches the normal values ob-served. This shows a parallelism with the growth pattern of the tumour in general. Total and differential counts of white blood cells revealed a marked rise in the total leukocyte counts and a reversal of the lymphoid-myeloid ratio during the growth of the tumour in the host

Instruction Tuned Models are Quick Learners

Instruction tuning of language models has demonstrated the ability to enhance model generalization to unseen tasks via in-context learning using a few examples. However, typical supervised learning still requires a plethora of downstream training data for finetuning. Often in real-world situations, there is a scarcity of data available for finetuning, falling somewhere between few shot inference and fully supervised finetuning. In this work, we demonstrate the sample efficiency of instruction tuned models over various tasks by estimating the minimal downstream training data required by them to perform transfer learning and match the performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) supervised models. We conduct experiments on 119 tasks from Super Natural Instructions (SuperNI) in both the single task learning (STL) and multi task learning (MTL) settings. Our findings reveal that, in the STL setting, instruction tuned models equipped with 25% of the downstream train data surpass the SOTA performance on the downstream tasks. In the MTL setting, an instruction tuned model trained on only 6% of downstream training data achieve SOTA, while using 100% of the training data results in a 3.69% points improvement (ROUGE-L 74.68) over the previous SOTA. We conduct an analysis on T5 vs Tk-Instruct by developing several baselines to demonstrate that instruction tuning aids in increasing both sample efficiency and transfer learning. Additionally, we observe a consistent ~4% performance increase in both settings when pre-finetuning is performed with instructions. Finally, we conduct a categorical study and find that contrary to previous results, tasks in the question rewriting and title generation categories suffer from instruction tuning.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 19 Tables (inclusing appendix), 12 pages of Appendi

Evaluation of wound healing and antimicrobial potentials of Ixora coccinea root extract

AbstractObjectiveTo evaluate the wound healing and antimicrobial activity of root extracts of Ixora coccinea (I. coccinea).MethodsTo investigate the wound healing efficacy of root extract of I. coccinea Linn, five groups of animals were divided each containing six animals. Two wound models including incision and excision wound models were used in this study. The parameters studied were tensile strength on incision wound model and in terms of wound contraction for excision wound model were compared with standard Nitrofurazone (NFZ) ointment (0.2% w/w). Six extracts (ethanol, aqueous, petroleum ether, benzene, chloroform and ethyl acetate) of I. coccinea were screened for in vitro growth inhibiting activity against different bacterial strains viz, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus pumilius, Enterococcus faecalis, Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi and Pseudomonas aeruginosa and fungi Candida albicans and Aspergillus niger were compared with the standard drugs ciprofloxacin and chloramphenicol for antibacterial and griseofulvin for antifungal screening. The serial dilution and cup (or) well plate methods were used for the antimicrobial study and MIC was determined.ResultsThe ethanolic extract showed significant (P<0.001) wound healing activity when compared to standard drug NFZ with respect to normal control group. Amongst all, ethanolic extract showed highly significant antibacterial activity against all bacterial strains used in this study when compared to standard. The aqueous extract showed moderate significant inhibition against all bacterial strains when compared to standard. All the extracts were shown negligible activity against the fungal strains used in this study.ConclusionsThe ethanolic root extract of I. coccinea showed pronounced wound healing and antibacterial activity. The probable reason to heal the wound was that the external application of the extract prevented the microbes to invade through the wound thus the protection of wound occurs against the infection of the various organisms

A Search for Biological Markers in Leukaemia and Lymphoma Group of Diseases

An attempt has been made to identify enzyme or hormonal markers in leukaemia and lymphoma group of diseases. Lysozyme has been found to be elevated in serum of patients with myeloid leukaemia; a fall in xanthine oxidase activity was noted in all cases studied. Incidence of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in serum was found to be very high in multiple myeloma and Hodgkins Disease followed by lymphocytic lymphoma; human placental lactogen (hPL) was present in few cases of lymphatic lymphoma. Reduced levels of xanthine oxidase would therefore indicate presence of leukaemia or lymphoma warranting further investigation. Markedly elevated serum lysozyme would imply myeloid leukaemia excluding diagnosis of lymphatic leukaemia and lymphomas. Detection of both hCG and hPL would be diagnostic of multiple myeloma/Hodgkin\u27s disease and lymphoma respectively

Mitochondrial Apoptosis and FAK Signaling Disruption by a Novel Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor, HTPB, in Antitumor and Antimetastatic Mouse Models

BACKGROUND: Compound targeting histone deacetylase (HDAC) represents a new era in molecular cancer therapeutics. However, effective HDAC inhibitors for the treatment of solid tumors remain to be developed. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here, we propose a novel HDAC inhibitor, N-Hydroxy-4-(4-phenylbutyryl-amino) benzamide (HTPB), as a potential chemotherapeutic drug for solid tumors. The HDAC inhibition of HTPB was confirmed using HDAC activity assay. The antiproliferative and anti-migratory mechanisms of HTPB were investigated by cell proliferation, flow cytometry, DNA ladder, caspase activity, Rho activity, F-actin polymerization, and gelatin-zymography for matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). Mice with tumor xenograft and experimental metastasis model were used to evaluate effects on tumor growth and metastasis. Our results indicated that HTPB was a pan-HDAC inhibitor in suppressing cell viability specifically of lung cancer cells but not of the normal lung cells. Upon HTPB treatment, cell cycle arrest was induced and subsequently led to mitochondria-mediated apoptosis. HTPB disrupted F-actin dynamics via downregulating RhoA activity. Moreover, HTPB inhibited activity of MMP2 and MMP9, reduced integrin-β1/focal adhesion complex formation and decreased pericellular poly-fibronectin assemblies. Finally, intraperitoneal injection or oral administration of HTPB efficiently inhibited A549 xenograft tumor growth in vivo without side effects. HTPB delayed lung metastasis of 4T1 mouse breast cancer cells. Acetylation of histone and non-histone proteins, induction of apoptotic-related proteins and de-phosphorylation of focal adhesion kinase were confirmed in treated mice. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: These results suggested that intrinsic apoptotic pathway may involve in anti-tumor growth effects of HTPB in lung cancer cells. HTPB significantly suppresses tumor metastasis partly through inhibition of integrin-β1/FAK/MMP/RhoA/F-actin pathways. We have provided convincing preclinical evidence that HTPB is a potent HDAC targeted inhibitor and is thus a promising candidate for lung cancer chemotherapy