Adrenomedullin Mitigates Doxorubicin-Induced Nephrotoxicity in Rats: Role of Oxidative Stress,Inflammation, Apoptosis,and Pyroptosis

Doxorubicin (DOX) is an anticancer antibiotic which has various effects in human cancers. It is one of the commonly known causes of drug-induced nephrotoxicity, which results in acute renal injury. Adrenomedullin (ADM), a vasodilator peptide, is widely distributed in many tissues and has potent protective effects. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine the protective potential mechanisms of ADM against DOX-induced nephrotoxicity. A total of 28 male Wistar rats were randomized into four groups: control group, doxorubicin group (15 mg/kg single intraperitoneal injection of DOX), adrenomedullin + doxorubicin group (12 μg/kg/day intraperitoneal injection of ADM) 3 days prior to DOX injection and continuing for 14 days after the model was established, and adrenomedullin group. Kidney function biomarkers, oxidative stress markers, and inflammatory mediators (TNF-α, NLRP3, IL-1β, and IL-18) were assessed. The expressions of gasdermin D and ASC were assessed by real-time PCR. Furthermore, the abundances of caspase-1 (p20), Bcl-2, and Bax immunoreactivity were evaluated. ADM administration improved the biochemical parameters of DOX-induced nephrotoxicity, significantly reduced oxidative damage markers and inflammatory mediators, and suppressed both apoptosis and pyroptosis. These results were confirmed by the histopathological findings and revealed that ADM’s antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, and anti-pyroptotic properties may have prospective applications in the amelioration of DOX-induced nephrotoxicity.     

Source rock evaluation of Kharita and Bahariya formations in some wells,North Western Desert,Egypt: Visual palynofacies and organic geochemical approaches

Palynofacies analyses were applied on ninety-one samples from the subsurface Albian – Cenomanian succession represented by Kharita and Bahariya formations, encountered in El-Noor, and South Sallum wells, located in the North Western Desert, Egypt, to visually characterize the content of dispersed organic matter, as well as, organic geochemical characterization to reveal the depositional paleoenvironments and source rock potentiality. The result recognized of five palynofacies associations in the studied interval. The deposition of Kharita Formation took place mainly in a steady and a relatively stable deltaic to marginal environment continued as well in the lower part of Bahariya Formation with minor changes. The marine influence became more common in the upper part of Bahariya Formation showing the exceptional high hydrocarbon potential recorded in the studied interval. This indicates marine transgression by the end of the early Cenomanian (Upper Bahariya) age. Samples from the Kharita Formation contain abundant brown phytoclasts which suggest gas-prone kerogen type III and IV. While Bahariya Formation includes translucent, brown cuticles and woody tracheid phytoclasts pointing to more promising gas-prone kerogen type III. The organic geochemical analysis shows poor to fair gas-prone source rock potential within the study section., Thermally, the color of the spore grains in Kharita and Bahariya formations show that dark yellow to orange, indicates immature besides their general little poor hydrocarbon generation potentiality.     

Synthesis and characterization of hydrogels based on gamma irradiation of acrylic acid and methacrylic acid

In this work, hydrogels based on different ratios of acrylic acid (AAc) and methacrylic acid (MAc) monomers were prepared by gamma radiation copolymerization. The hydrogels were characterized by IR spectroscopy and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The effect of temperature and pH on the degree of swelling of AAc/MAc hydrogels was also studied. The results showed that the gel fraction of AAc is relatively higher than MAc, while the gel fraction of AAc/MAc hydrogels decreased slightly with increasing the ratio of MAc monomer in the initial solution. The IR spectroscopic analysis indicates the formation of copolymer networks and the presence of hydrogen bonding. The thermal study showed that PAAc hydrogel displayed higher thermal stability than PMAc and AAc/MAc hydrogels, over the studied compositions. The results showed that PAAc hydrogel reached equilibrium swelling state in water after 4 h, whereas PMAc and AAc/MAc hydrogels reached the equilibrium after 7 h. In this regard, AAc/MAc hydrogels showed degree of swelling in water lower than PAAc and higher than PMAc hydrogels. It was found that the swelling of the hydrogels based on AAc and MAc monomers or their copolymers increases with increasing temperature up to 50°C. Moreover, it was observed that the degree of swelling of hydrogels were not affected by increasing the pH values up to 4 and increased greatly within the pH values from 5 to 9. POLYM. COMPOS., 2009. © 2008 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Transformation of Function Block Diagrams to UPPAAL timed automata for the verification of safety applications

Verification of IEC 61131-3 based safety applications is a challenge in the industrial automation domain. In this paper, the transformation of FBD diagrams to UPPAAL formal models was adopted to address this challenge. A set of transformation rules are defined for the automatic transformation of IEC 61131-3 Function Block based safety applications to UPPAAL timed automata models. These models are next used for the verification of the safety application. Both the source and the target domain models have been formally defined and these definitions are used for the definition of the transformation rules. Based on this a prototype model transformer was developed using Java. The transformer was used with various safety applications to check the efficiency of the transformation process. A laboratory system is presented as a case study to highlight the proposed approach.     

Verification and validation of safety applications based on PLCopen safety function blocks

Functional Safety is a major concern in the design of automation systems today. Many of those systems are realized using Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) programmed according to IEC 61131-3. PLCopen - as IEC 61131 user organization - semi-formally specified a set of software function blocks to be used in safety applications according to IEC 61508. In the presented work, formal models in the form of timed automata for the safety function blocks (SFBs) are constructed from the semi-formal specifications. The accordance of the formalized blocks to the specification is verified using model checking. Furthermore, their behaviour is validated against specified test cases by simulation. The resulting verified and validated library of formal models is used to build a formal model of a given safety application - built from SFBs - and to verify and validate its properties.     

Scalable Approach to Failure Analysis of High‐Performance Computing Systems

Failure analysis is necessary to clarify the root cause of a failure, predict the next time a failure may occur, and improve the performance and reliability of a system. However, it is not an easy task to analyze and interpret failure data, especially for complex systems. Usually, these data are represented using many attributes, and sometimes they are inconsistent and ambiguous. In this paper, we present a scalable approach for the analysis and interpretation of failure data of high‐performance computing systems. The approach employs rough sets theory (RST) for this task. The application of RST to a large publicly available set of failure data highlights the main attributes responsible for the root cause of a failure. In addition, it is used to analyze other failure characteristics, such as time between failures, repair times, workload running on a failed node, and failure category. Experimental results show the scalability of the presented approach and its ability to reveal dependencies among different failure characteristics.     

High capacity information hiding for privacy protection in digital video files

In this paper, a framework to hide privacy in video is proposed based on data hiding principals. A novel data hiding technique is proposed and implemented to hide the original frame into the in-painted one. The proposed hiding technique is carried out in the discrete wavelet transform domain of the cover video. The proposed technique is embedding video into video. Furthermore, the proposed data hiding method can blindly reconstruct the original frame from the fake one. Experimental results showed that the proposed method can successfully hide the complete frames of the original video into their corresponding in-painted ones that are as large as themselves. Simple visual inspection of the results showed that the quality of the stego-frames maintain very high (above 45 dB) while providing an acceptable visual quality for the retrieved original frames.