Accurate prediction of scorpion toxin functional properties from primary structures

Scorpion toxins are common experimental tools for studies of biochemical and pharmacological properties of ion channels. The number of functionally annotated scorpion toxins is steadily growing, but the number of identified toxin sequences is increasing at much faster pace. With an estimated 100,000 different variants, bioinformatic analysis of scorpion toxins is becoming a necessary tool for their systematic functional analysis. Here, we report a bioinformatics-driven system involving scorpion toxin structural classification, functional annotation, database technology, sequence comparison, nearest neighbour analysis, and decision rules which produces highly accurate predictions of scorpion toxin functional properties.     

Design of concurrent error detectable current-mode A/D converters for real-time applications

Analog MOS circuits are becoming increasingly sophisticated in terms of checking and correcting themselves. Self-correcting, self-compensating, or self-calibrating techniques eliminate errors traditionally associated with analog circuits. For real-time applications, however, it is rather difficult to achieve validation of the data generated from analog-to-digital (A/D) converters in the presence of faulty switching element(s). Conventionally, the validation is accomplished by using a high resolution and high accuracy D/A converter and a window comparator; i.e., the validation must highly depend on the reliability of both the D/A converter and the window comparator. In this paper, a novel current-mode A/D converter design with concurrent error detection (CED) capability is presented. The A/D converter does not need well-matched components and high-gain amplifiers. Results show that the proposed design can detect all the transient faults and most of the permanent faults. The proposed design allows users to easily switch to the normal operation mode where CED capability is not used, without causing any performance degradation.     

Investigations on the Machinability of Al/SiC/RHA Hybrid Metal Matrix Composites

Silicon - Hybrid aluminum metal matrix composites (MMC’s) are the emerging materials that gain superior properties in terms of hardness, specific strength, mechanical and physical properties...     

Bacterial Antigens Reduced the Inhibition Effect of Capsaicin on Cal 27 Oral Cancer Cell Proliferation

Oral cancer is a major global health problem with high incidence and low survival rates. The oral cavity contains biofilms as dental plaques that harbour both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacterial antigens, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and lipoteichoic acid (LTA), respectively. LPS and LTA are known to stimulate cancer cell growth, and the bioactive phytochemical capsaicin has been reported to reverse this effect. Here, we tested the efficacy of oral cancer chemotherapy treatment with capsaicin in the presence of LPS, LTA or the combination of both antigens. LPS and LTA were administered to Cal 27 oral cancer cells prior to and/or concurrently with capsaicin, and the treatment efficacy was evaluated by measuring cell proliferation and apoptotic cell death. We found that while capsaicin inhibits oral cancer cell proliferation and metabolism (MT Glo assay) and increases cell death (Trypan blue exclusion assay and Caspase 3/7 expression), its anti-cancer effect was significantly reduced on cells that are either primed or exposed to the bacterial antigens. Capsaicin treatment significantly increased oral cancer cells’ suppressor of cytokine signalling 3 gene expression. This increase was reversed in the presence of bacterial antigens during treatment. Our data establish a rationale for clinical consideration of bacterial antigens that may interfere with the treatment efficacy of oral cancer.     

ML218 HCl Is More Efficient Than Capsaicin in Inhibiting Bacterial Antigen-Induced Cal 27 Oral Cancer Cell Proliferation

The bacterial antigen, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and disruptions in calcium channels are independently known to influence oral cancer progression. Previously, we found that bacterial antigens, LPS and lipoteichoic acid (LTA) act as confounders during the action of capsaicin on Cal 27 oral cancer proliferation. As calcium channel drugs may affect oral cancer cell proliferation, we investigated the effect of ML218 HCl, a T-type voltage-gated calcium channel blocker, on the proliferation of Cal 27 oral cancer cells. We hypothesized that ML218 HCl could effectively reduce LPS-induced oral cancer cell proliferation. LPS and LTA antigens were added to Cal 27 oral cancer cells either prior to and/or concurrently with ML218 HCl treatment, and the efficacy of the treatment was evaluated by measuring Cal 27 proliferation, cell death and apoptosis. ML218 HCl inhibited oral cancer cell proliferation, increased apoptosis and cell death, but their efficacy was significantly reduced in the presence of bacterial antigens. ML218 HCl proved more effective than capsaicin in reducing bacterial antigen-induced Cal 27 oral cancer cell proliferation. Our results also suggest an interplay of proliferation factors during the bacterial antigens and calcium channel drug interaction in Cal 27. Bacterial antigen reduction of drug efficacy should be considered for developing newer pharmacological agents or testing the efficacy of the existing oral cancer chemotherapeutic agents. Finally, voltage gated calcium channel drugs should be considered for future oral cancer research.     

A Hybrid Features Extraction on Face for Efficient Face Recognition

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Image Processing is one of the vibrant research areas nowadays and particularly face recognition is given much importance in all the sectors. Accordingly this...     

Recruitment and Retention for Community‐Based eHealth Interventions with Populations of Low Socioeconomic Position: Strategies and Challenges

Given persistent communication inequalities, it is important to develop interventions to improve Internet and health literacy among underserved populations. These goals drove the Click to Connect project, a community‐based eHealth intervention that provided novice computer users of low socioeconomic position with broadband Internet access, training classes, a Web portal, and technical support. In this article, we describe the strategies used to recruit and retain this population, the budgetary implications of such strategies, and the challenges and successes we encountered. Results suggest that personal contact between study staff and participants and provision of in‐depth technical support were central to successful recruitment and retention. Such investments are essential to realize the promise of eHealth with underserved populations.     

Hardware implementation analysis of SHA-256 and SHA-512 algorithms on FPGAs

Hash functions are common and important cryptographic primitives, which are very critical for data integrity assurance and data origin authentication security services. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) being reconfigurable, flexible and physically secure are a natural choice for implementation of hash functions in a broad range of applications with different area-performance requirements. In this paper, we explore alternative architectures for the implementation of hash algorithms of the secure hash standards SHA-256 and SHA-512 on FPGAs and study their area-performance trade-offs. As several 64-bit adders are needed in SHA-512 hash value computation, new architectures proposed in this paper implement modulo-64 addition as modulo-32, modulo-16 and modulo-8 additions with a view to reduce the chip area. Hash function SHA-512 is implemented in different FPGA families of ALTERA to compare their performance metrics such as area, memory, latency, clocking frequency and throughput to guide a designer to select the most suitable FPGA for an application. In addition, a common architecture is designed for implementing SHA-256 and SHA-512 algorithms.