Prunetinoside Inhibits Lipopolysaccharide-Provoked Inflammatory Response via Suppressing NF-κB and Activating the JNK-Mediated Signaling Pathway in RAW264.7 Macrophage Cells

Inflammation is a multifaceted response of the immune system at the site of injury or infection caused by pathogens or stress via immune cells. Due to the adverse effects of chemical drugs, plant-based compounds are gaining interest in current research. Prunetinoside or prunetin-5-O-glucoside (PUG) is a plant-based active compound, which possesses anti-inflammatory effects on immune cells. In this study, we investigate the effect of PUG on mouse macrophage RAW264.7 cells with or without stimulation of lipopolysaccharide (LPS). Cytotoxicity results showed that PUG is non-cytotoxic to the cells and it reversed the cytotoxicity in LPS-stimulated cells. The levels of nitric oxide (NO) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) were determined using a NO detection kit and IL-6 ELISA kit, respectively, and showed a significant decrease in NO and IL-6 in PUG-treated cells. Western blot and qRT-PCR were performed for the expression of two important pro-inflammatory cytokines, COX2 and iNOS, and found that their expression was downregulated in a dose-dependent manner. Other pro-inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-1β, IL-6, and TNFα, had reduced mRNA expression after PUG treatment. Furthermore, a Western blot was performed to calculate the expression of NF-κB and MAPK pathway proteins. The results show that PUG administration dramatically reduced the phosphorylation of p-Iκbα, p-NF-κB 65, and p-JNK. Remarkably, after PUG treatment, p-P38 and p-ERK remain unchanged. Furthermore, docking studies revealed that PUG is covalently linked to NF-κB and suppresses inflammation. In conclusion, PUG exerted the anti-inflammatory mechanism by barring the NF-κB pathway and activating JNK. Thus, prunetinoside could be adopted as a therapeutic compound for inflammatory-related conditions.     

Metasin—An Intra-Operative RT-qPCR Assay to Detect Metastatic Breast Cancer in Sentinel Lymph Nodes

Nodal status is one of the most important prognostic factors in breast cancer. Established tests such as touch imprint cytology and frozen sections currently used in the intra-operative setting show variations in sensitivity and specificity. This limitation has led to the development of molecular alternatives, such as GeneSearch, a commercial intra-operative real-time quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-qPCR) assay that allows the surgeon to carry out axillary clearance as a one-step process. Since GeneSearch has been discontinued, we have developed the replacement Metasin assay, which targets the breast epithelial cell markers CK19 and mammaglobin mRNA and identifies metastatic disease in sentinel lymph nodes. The optimised assay can be completed within 32 min (6 min for RNA preparation and 26 min instrument run time), making its use feasible in the intraoperative setting. An analysis by Metasin of 154 archived lymph node homogenates previously analysed by both parallel histology and GeneSearch showed concordance for 148 cases. The sensitivity and specificity of Metasin compared with GeneSearch were 95% (CI 83%–99%) and 97% (CI 91%–99%) respectively; compared with histology they were 95% (CI 83%–99%) and 97% (CI 91%–99%), respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of GeneSearch compared with histology were 90% (CI 77%–96%) and 97% (CI 93%–99%) respectively. The positive predictive value of Metasin was 90% and negative predictive value was 98% for both histology and GeneSearch. The positive predictive value of GeneSearch was 92% and the negative predictive value was 97% compared to histology. The discordance rates of Metasin with both GeneSearch and histology were 3.89%. In comparison, the discordance rate of GeneSearch with histology was 4.5%. Metasin’s robustness was independently evaluated on 193 samples previously analysed by GeneSearch from the Jules Bordet Institute, where Metasin yielded comparable results.     

Mechanisms by which flavonol aglycones inhibit lipid oxidation better than glycosylated flavonols in comminuted muscle tissue

The effect of glycosylation on the ability of flavonoids to inhibit lipid oxidation in comminuted muscle tissue has not been previously examined. This work examined the ability of quercetin and quercetin-β-d-glucoside to inhibit lipid oxidation in mechanically separated turkey (MST). Quercetin inhibited formation of lipid peroxides and thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) more effectively compared to quercetin-β-d-glucoside during frozen storage (p < 0.05). The possible mechanisms that cause glycosylation to decrease inhibition of lipid oxidation were also examined. Hydroxyl radical scavenging activity was similar when comparing quercetin and quercetin-β-d-glucoside, which indicated that the free hydroxyl group in 3 position of C ring in quercetin did not enhance its hydroxyl radical scavenging ability. Since muscle membrane lipids are susceptible to lipid oxidation, the ability of quercetin and quercetin-β-d-glucoside to incorporate into cellular membranes was studied. After adding quercetin and quercetin-β-d-glucoside to minced chicken muscle, flavonol content in the membrane fraction was determined. Around 32% of added quercetin partitioned into the membranes whereas quercetin-β-d-glucoside was not detected in the membranes. Similar trends were observed when each flavonol was added to isolated membranes. These studies suggest that glycosylation of flavonols weakens their ability to inhibit lipid oxidation in muscle tissue partly by decreasing the amount of flavonols in the membrane phase. In order to understand whether metal chelation by flavonols is a likely mechanism involved in the inhibition of lipid oxidation in MST, the role of endogenous metals in promoting lipid oxidation was examined. Addition of the metal chelators ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA) and tetrakis(2-pyridylmethyl) ethylenediamine (TPEN) to MST did not inhibit lipid oxidation, which suggests that endogenous metals present in MST were not promoters of lipid oxidation. Hence it seems unlikely that the mechanism of inhibition by flavonols involved metal chelation in the comminuted muscle.     

Implementation and Investigation of an Optimal Full Adder Design for Low Power and Reduced Delay Conditions

Wireless Personal Communications - Full adder is one of the important components in electronics, used for various fundamental processing algorithms such as addition and multiplication. The...     

Analytical Modeling of Surrounding Gate Junctionless MOSFET Using Finite Differentiation Method

Silicon - In this paper, a novel two-dimensional analytical model for threshold voltage on Dual Material Surrounding Gate Junctionless MOSFET is proposed. The analytical study is aimed at...     

Modelling LSUTE: PKE Schemes for Safeguarding Electronic Healthcare Records Over Cloud Communication Environment

Wireless Personal Communications - Presently offering safety to the information stored in a cloud environment is a crucial and demanding process. For fulfilling various confidentiality safeguarding...     

Convolution neural network and deep-belief network (DBN) based automatic detection and diagnosis of Glaucoma

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Diagnosis of Glaucoma eye disease is a challenging task for CADx (computer-aided diagnostics) systems. An automatic CADx framework is developed for diagnosing...     

Energy efficient VLSI decoder chip with reduced PAPR in FECG monitoring

ABSTRACT

Medical data transmission is a major challenge in wireless communication to preserve their integrity and coherence. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has emerged as a modulation scheme that can achieve high data rates over frequency selective fading channel by multipath effects. As the foetal ECG (FECG) signal is large to process, the dimensionality of the data is reduced by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and is then sent through the space time block coded (STBC) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) upon using cockroach swarm pptimisation algorithm as a classifier to demarcate the FECG signal from noise. This paper also proposes decoder design for STBC transmission over frequency-selective time-variant channels with data recovery at the receiver by using proposed error prediction and correction adders (EPD) to achieve reduced peak to average power ration (PAPR). The simulation results prove that the PAPR reduces by 1.3 dB and the sensitivity of classifier is 96.4%. The implementations are carried out over 200 data sets taken from MIT-BIH arrhythmia using simulation tools such as MATLAB 2013b, ModelSim 10.0b and Cadence Virtuoso under 65 nm. The finally fabricated and tested decoder chip consumes an average power of 0.64 µW.     

Photocatalytic hydrogen production using TiO2 coated iron-oxide core shell particles

Photocatalytic water splitting plays a challenging role as it is one of the most important reactions for solving energy, environmental problems and sustainability. Photocatalytic water splitting was improved by using a novel kind of magnetically separable core shell nano photocatalyst TiO₂/Fe₂O₃, prepared by co-precipitation method. It was characterised for particle size (XRD), band gap (UV-DRS), morphology (SEM), particle size (HRTEM), elemental composition (EDS) and electrochemical studies. Photocatalytic splitting of water was examined in tubular reactor of 500 mL capacity with various sacrificial agents viz., methanol, ethanol, acetic acid, lactic acid, EDTA and triethanolamine. To enhance the hydrogen production, various operating parameters viz., effect of sacrificial agents, catalytic dosage, light irradiation and recycle flow rate were optimized. With the optimized operating parameters (0.2 g catalyst dosage, 60 mL/min recycle flow rate, 96 W/m² light irradiation and EDTA as sacrificial agent) the maximum hydrogen achieved was 2700 μmol/h for the quantum yield of 3.86% at 550 nm. The reusability studies were conducted and the TiO₂ coated Fe₂O₃ core shell particles were found to be stable than the plain TiO₂ nano particles. Effective charge transfer from TiO₂ to Fe₂O₃ and the suppression of e^?/h⁺ pair recombination attributed significant enhancement in photoactivity, thereby increasing the hydrogen production.