Synthesizing and Characterization of Amino Acid Based Ionic Liquids for Pharmaceutical Applications

There has been a growing attention towards amino acid based ionic liquids (AAILs) since the past decade. Synthesizing ionic liquids (ILs) from renewable biomaterials is a promising method to improve the biocompatibility and biodegradability of ionic liquids. In this project, 10 choline based ILs were synthesized with different\ud amino acids and tested towards gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria to show the relationship between the anion structure and the degree of toxicity. All the AAILs demonstrated a high biocompatibility towards the tested bacteria and their toxicity decreased by smaller molecular size of anion. Additionally, biodegradability of the synthesized AAILs were assessed via the method of closed bottle test employing river water microorganisms and it turned out that all the AAILs had over 60% biodegradation which classifies them as “readily biodegradable”. Longer chain length and presence of functional groups in the structure of anion directly affected the molecular breakdown by microbial activities

Synthesizing and Characterization of Amino Acid Based Ionic Liquids for Pharmaceutical Applications

There has been a growing attention towards amino acid based ionic liquids (AAILs) since the past decade. Synthesizing ionic liquids (ILs) from renewable biomaterials is a promising method to improve the biocompatibility and biodegradability of ionic liquids. In this project, 10 choline based ILs were synthesized with different amino acids and tested towards gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria to show the relationship between the anion structure and the degree of toxicity. All the AAILs demonstrated a high biocompatibility towards the tested bacteria and their toxicity decreased by smaller molecular size of anion. Additionally, biodegradability of the synthesized AAILs were assessed via the method of closed bottle test employing river water microorganisms and it turned out that all the AAILs had over 60% biodegradation which classifies them as “readily biodegradable”. Longer chain length and presence of functional groups in the structure of anion directly affected the molecular breakdown by microbial activities

Relationship between the Subscales of Mental Health and Spiritual Health in Staff of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences in 2016

For downloading the full-text of this article please click here.Background and Objective: Spiritual health is a valuable asset that affects humans’ mental health. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the mental health and spiritual health among the staff of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences in 2016.Method: In this cross-sectional study, 267 employees of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences were surveyed by simple random sampling. The data collection tools included Goldenberg’s General Health Questionnaire and Paloutzian and Ellison’s Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using Pearson product moment correlation. In this research, all ethical issues were observed. In addition, the authors did not report any conflict of interests.Results: According to the results of the study, the mean mental health score was 2.98, while the mean score of spiritual health was 3.62. In addition, there was a significant correlation between the mental and spiritual health (r=0.324). Considering the subscales of mental health, spiritual health registered the highest and lowest correlations with depression and physical symptoms respectively.Conclusion: Improving the mental health of the effective and constructive population of the society is necessary for the dynamism, prosperity and promotion of the society. Spiritual health affects the university staff's mental health. Therefore, planning to promote it is an important issue that should be considered by the relevant authorities and policy makers.For downloading the full-text of this article please click here.Please cite this article as: Ziapour A, GhaderiA, VafapoorH, Yazdani V, Saeidi Sh, Zangeneh AR. Relationship between the Subscales of Mental Health and Spiritual Health in Staff of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences in 2016. J Res Relig Health. 2018; 4(3): 34- 44

Estimation and prediction of avoidable health care costs of cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes through adequate dairy food consumption: a systematic review and micro simulation modeling study

Background: Recent evidence from prospective cohort studies show a relationship between consumption of dairy foods and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). This association highlights the importance of dairy foods consumption in prevention of these diseases and also reduction of associated healthcare costs. The aim of this study was to estimate avoidable healthcare costs of CVD and T2D through adequate dairy foods consumption in Iran. Methods: This was a multistage modelling study. We conducted a systematic literature review in PubMed and EMBASE to identify any association between incidence of CVD and T2DM and dairy foods intake, and also associated relative risks. We obtained age- and sex-specific dairy foods consumption level and healthcare expenditures from national surveys and studies. Patient level simulation Markov models were constructed to predict the disease incidence, patient population size and associated healthcare costs for current and optimal dairy foods consumption at different time horizons (1, 5, 10 and 20 years). All parameters including costs and transition probabilities were defined as statistical distributions in the models, and all analyses were conducted by accounting for first and second order uncertainty. Results: The systematic review results indicated that dairy foods consumption was inversely associated with incidence of T2DM, coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke. We estimated that the introduction of a diet containing 3 servings of dairy foods per day may produce a $0.43 saving in annual per capita healthcare costs in Iran in the first year due to saving in cost of CVD and T2DM treatment. The estimated savings in per capita healthcare costs were$8.42, $39.97 and$190.25 in 5, 10 and 20-years’ time, respectively. Corresponding total aggregated avoidable costs for the entire Iranian population within the study time horizons were $33.83,$661.31, $3,138.21 and$14,934.63 million, respectively. Conclusion: Our analysis demonstrated that increasing dairy foods consumption to recommended levels would be associated with reductions in healthcare costs. Further randomized trial studies are required to investigate the effect of dairy foods intake on cost of CVD and T2DM in the population

Global systematic review of primary immunodeficiency registries

Introduction During the last 4 decades, registration of patients with primary immunodeficiencies (PID) has played an essential role in different aspects of these diseases worldwide including epidemiological indexes, policymaking, quality controls of care/life, facilitation of genetic studies and clinical trials as well as improving our understanding about the natural history of the disease and the immune system function. However, due to the limitation of sustainable resources supporting these registries, inconsistency in diagnostic criteria and lack of molecular diagnosis as well as difficulties in the documentation and designing any universal platform, the global perspective of these diseases remains unclear. Areas covered Published and unpublished studies from January 1981 to June 2020 were systematically reviewed on PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus. Additionally, the reference list of all studies was hand-searched for additional studies. This effort identified a total of 104614 registered patients and suggests identification of at least 10590 additional PID patients, mainly from countries located in Asia and Africa. Molecular defects in genes known to cause PID were identified and reported in 13852 (13.2% of all registered) patients. Expert opinion Although these data suggest some progress in the identification and documentation of PID patients worldwide, achieving the basic requirement for the global PID burden estimation and registration of undiagnosed patients will require more reinforcement of the progress, involving both improved diagnostic facilities and neonatal screening.Peer reviewe

Contributions to optimal detection in OTDM and OCDMA optical receivers

Recent developments in optical communication systems have increased the performance of optical networks. Low attenuation fiber optics, high spectral purity lasers and optical amplifiers, among others, are systems that have allowed to transport terabits per second across thousands of kilometers, in a more reliable, secure and efficient manner, compared to radiofrequency (RF) systems. New optical access network technologies such as EPON and GPON are also providing Gbit/s connectivity to customers in both the enterprise and consumer markets. This transport capacity provides enough data for the growing demand of new communication services. The main goal of the researchers in optical networks is to provide higher-speed data transmission by exploiting the intrinsically fast behavior of the optical domain. Optical signal processing is a key technology for constructing flexible and ultra high-speed photonic networks. In this context, it will be possible to build ultra-high speed, simple and reliable optical networks, at low operational expenses, regardless of the format of the information. Before these technologies enter into commercial operation, some obstacles should be removed, such as the problem of obtaining extremely precise synchronization of the network without any optical-electrical conversion. Also, a synchronization-related problem appear at the receiver for some systems such as OTDM and OCDMA, where even the fastest photo-detectors are not able to separate the data of the desired user from the signals of the adjacent users. This means that detection of ultrashort pulses in the presence of the multiple access interference (MAI) is key in these systems. Therefore, it is vital to apply an all-optical signal processing on the received optical signal before the photo-detection. In most of the ultra-high-speed light-wave communication systems, it is an effective technique to use an optical time gating at the receiver side in order to extract the desired user's signal from the received signal. This approach requires an optical clock recovery procedure. But by increasing the data rate in optical networks the accuracy of the optical clock recovery decreases because of increasing jitter and MAI and consequently the system performance is degraded. Currently the only approach is to use a clock signal that has the same pulse-width as the data, and when the jitter is large, this technique fails to properly capture the main part of the data signal and collects more interference instead, so these techniques have to lower the data-rate to avoid large BERs. Our contributions can achieve larger signal to noise ratio versus the fixed pulse-width clock. The main goal of this work is to discuss the characteristics of the current transmission technologies, including OTDM and OCDMA, providing a detailed analytical model and proposing a solution for improving the performance of optical receivers. We use a nonlinear media (Four Wave Mixing) as a combiner in the receivers. We have modeled analytically the relationship between the input and the output of the nonlinear media systems in these techniques using nonlinear Schrödinger equations. Then, we solved these equations by Volterra series. Our aim is to develop analytical models of the response of the optical receiver, and validate them with simulations. Also we consider the effect of variation of the bandwidth of the clock in the performance of receivers with presence of jitter. We obtain the optimum value of the clock's bandwidth and confirm that theory and simulation results coincide. Using our proposed technique, the data-rate of the optical systems can be increased and we can achieve a lower BER for the same jitter. The goal of these efforts is the improvement of the overall performance of the network, in terms of transmission speed, bit error rate (BER), reliability and cost. The results could be applied to next-generation optical networks, in both the backbone and access scenarios.Los sistemas de comunicaciones ópticas aumentan constantemente su rendimiento. La disponibilidad de fibras con muy baja atenuación, láseres de alta pureza espectral y amplificadores ópticos, entre otros, hacen factible el transporte de Tbit/s a miles de kilómetros, de una manera más fiable, segura y eficiente que los sistemas basados en radiofrecuencia. Una nueva generación de redes ópticas de acceso, tales como EPON y GPON, ya están proporcionando conectividad a Gbit/s en los mercados tanto empresarial y de consumo, lo que permitirá sostener la creciente demanda de los usuarios. El principal objetivo de los investigadores en el campo de las redes ópticas es aumentar la velocidad de transmisión de datos, explotando el comportamiento intrínsecamente rápido del dominio óptico. En este contexto, el procesado de la señal en el dominio óptico es una tecnología clave para la construcción de redes fotónicas manteniendo su simplicidad y el bajo coste de operación, así como la independencia del formato de la información. Para conseguirlo, hay obstáculos a superar, como el problema del mantenimiento de la sincronía extremadamente precisa que es necesaria en redes sin conversión electro-óptica. Otro problema es la recuperación de la sincronía en los detectores de los receptores usados en las técnicas OTDM y OCDMA, donde incluso los fotodetectores más rápidos no son capaces de separar los datos del usuario deseado de las señales de los usuarios adyacentes. La detección de pulsos ultracortos en presencia de la interferencia debida al acceso múltiple (MAI) es un reto importante. Por ello es vital aplicar procesado óptico en la señal recibida, antes de la fotodetección. Una técnica efectiva para realizar la detección es el uso de una puerta óptica en el receptor, con el fin de extraer la señal del usuario deseado. Esto requiere recuperar por procedimientos puramente ópticos la señal de reloj. Pero al aumentar la velocidad de transmisión, la precisión de la recuperación de reloj disminuye debido al aumento de la fluctuación de fase (jitter) y la MAI, y en consecuencia el rendimiento del sistema se degrada. Actualmente, el enfoque usado es usar un reloj con el mismo ancho de pulso que la señal de datos útiles, pero cuando la fluctuación de fase es grande, esta técnica falla al no capturar correctamente la parte principal de la señal de datos y recoger una mayor interferencia. Forzando estas técnicas a trabajar a velocidades inferiores a las potenciales para evitar que la tasa de errores (BER) se dispare. Este trabajo logra una mayor relación señal a ruido (y por tanto, una BER inferior) respecto el caso de las señales con duración fija del pulso de reloj. Se han analizado las características de las tecnologías OTDM y OCDMA, proponiendo un modelo analítico detallado, y se ha aportado una solución para mejorar el rendimiento de los receptores ópticos, utilizando un medio no lineal (Four Wave Mixing) como combinador en los receptores. Se ha modelado analíticamente la relación entre la entrada y la salida en un medio no lineal, mediante técnicas que utilizan las ecuaciones de Schrödinger, solucionadas mediante series de Volterra. Los modelos analiticos de la respuesta del receptor óptico se han validado con simulaciones, teniendo en cuenta el efecto de la variación del ancho de banda del reloj en el rendimiento de los receptores, con presencia de fluctuación de fase. Se ha obtenido el valor óptimo del ancho de banda de la señal de reloj, y se ha comprobado que los resultados de la teoría y la simulación coinciden. Los resultados obtenidos permiten incrementar la velocidad de transmisión de datos en redes ópticas manteniendo la BER, o bien obtener una BER más baja para el mismo nivel de jitterPostprint (published version

Structural analysis and mechanical properties of amorphous steel composites

In the first part of this research, we developed a differential scanning calorimetry method for calculating the initial crystallinity, change of crystallinity and crystallinity percentage of amorphous metal alloys as a function of temperature. Using thermodynamic enthalpies of amorphous, crystalline and partially devitrified specimens, our methodology can determine crystallinity percentages as low as a few percent. This technique also eliminates the need for expensive in situ accessories, such as those required in electron microscopy. In the second part, we report the effect of crystallinity percentage on the compressive deformation response of partially devitrified in situ Fe-based bulk metallic glass matrix composites (SAM25-Dev), consisting of an amorphous matrix and evenly dispersed nanocrystals (BCC iron, carbides, and borides) of sizes smaller than 20 nm. The SAM25-Dev specimens were obtained by consolidating SAM25 powders using the spark plasma sintering technique. The crystallinity percentage of the sintered samples varied between 20% and 61% depending on the sintering temperature. Macroscopically, bulk samples tested under compression exhibited an ~8% elastic deformation, which is significantly higher than elastic strains of other Fe-based bulk metallic glass composites, and strengths of ~2 GPa at fracture. Indentation toughness of the samples was below 1.6 MPa•m0.5, which categorizes the material as a brittle composite. Compression tests on micro-pillars resulted in specimen failure from the propagation of one principle shear band. Here, yield strength was corrected for the effect of taper angle of the micro-pillars and values above 5 GPa were obtained, making the material an ultra-hard composite. Such a high strength is attributed to the extremely small Poisson’s ratio (< 0.1) and higher glass transition temperature (883 K) of this material Both the compressive strength and fracture toughness of the specimens were negligibly dependent on the crystallinity percentage, implying that the radii of the plastic zones at the crack tips are smaller than the distance between nanocrystals on the specimens. Moreover, we find that SAM25-Dev shows a very high sample size dependency of strength (above 200%), which indicates a significant defect sensitivity. As a result, the residual porosity despite being minimal, strongly deteriorates the strength of the materials

An acoustical approach toward composition

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Characterization of a TetR/AcrR family transcriptional repressor gene NpR3597 in Nostoc punctiforme

Includes bibliographical references (pages 49-52)Nostoc punctiforme is a filamentous cyanobacterium capable of differentiating its vegetative cells into spore-like akinetes that can withstand desiccation and cold. The NpR3597 gene was previously identified in a time-course DNA microarray experiment to be up-regulated during akinete formation, and up-regulated in dividing cells of the filament as indicated by GFP transcriptional reporter strains. Sequence similarity to characterized proteins indicates that this is a putative tetracycline repressor family protein similar to TetR/AcrR found in a vast array of bacteria species that represses divergently transcribed genes encoding for ABC transport proteins. The mechanism of AcrR repression typically involves binding to an inverted repeat in the promoter of the divergently transcribed gene, inhibiting attachment of RNA polymerase. Although no phenotype could be determined for a NpR3597 deletion mutant strain, an over-expression strain bearing multiple copies of this gene on a plasmid under control of its own promoter caused pigmentation changes. Desiccation-revival tests showed that over-expression of NpR3597 results in nonfunctional akinetes. Spectrophotometric examination of the over-expression strain indicated that the levels of phycocyanin, a light harvesting protein subunit of the photosynthetic phycobilisome apparatus, was significantly higher than normal. Through a second round of microarray analysis, it was found that over-expression of NpR3597 correlated to increased transcription of genes involved in phycocyanin synthesis as well as other photosynthetic genes, and down-regulation of upstream divergently transcribed multi-drug resistance efflux pump gene NpF3598. Strong down-regulation of a number of additional genes with inverted repeat sequences in their upstream intergenic region, particularly another multi-drug resistance efflux pump gene NpF1932, was also observed. To determine the binding site for NpR3597, a conserved inverted repeat sequence found upstream of both NpF3598 and NpF1932 was used in Electric Mobility Gel Shift Assays (EMSA). A plasmid encoding for a 6xHistidine tagged NpR3597 was constructed, and the His-tagged protein purified. DNA fragments containing or lacking the putative inverted repeat binding sites were generated by PCR, end-labeled with biotin and used for EMSA with the purified protein. Only fragments containing the following motif ANNNNACNN ??? N2 - CNGTNTAGT in their inverted repeat sequence exhibited a gel mobility shift, indicating NpR3597 likely acts as a dimer and represses transcription by binding to these inverted repeat (IR) sequences