Comparison of biosynthetic zinc oxide nanoparticle and glucantime cytotoxic effects on Leishmania major (MRHO/IR/75/ER).

Currently, zinc oxide (ZnO) particles are used in nanotechnology to destroy a wide range of microorganisms. Although pentavalent antimony compounds are used as antileishmanial drugs, they are associated with several limitations and side effects. Therefore, it is always desirable to try to find new and effective treatments. The aim of this research is to determine the antileishmanial effect of ZnO particles in comparison to the Antimoan Meglumine compound on promastigotes and amastigotes of Leishmania major (MRHO/IR/75/ER). After the extraction and purification of macrophages from the peritoneal cavity of C57BL/6 mice, L. major parasites were cultured in Roswell Park Memorial Institute-1640 culture medium containing fetal bovine serum (FBS) 10% and antibiotic. In this experimental study, the effect of different concentrations of nanoparticles was investigated using the 3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5-diphenyl-tetrazolium bromide (MTT) colorimetric method, in comparison to the glucantime on promastigotes, amastigotes and healthy macrophages in the culture medium. The amount of light absorption of the obtained color from the regeneration of tetrazolium salt to the product color of formazan by the parasite was measured by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) reader, and the IC50 value was calculated. IC50 after 24 h of incubation was calculated as IC50 = 358.6 µg/mL. The results showed, that the efficacy of ZnO nanoparticles was favorable and dose-dependent. The concentration of 500 µg/mL of ZnO nanoparticles induced 84.67% apoptosis after 72. Also, the toxicity of nanoparticles was less than the drug. Nanoparticles exert their cytotoxic effects by inducing apoptosis. They can be suitable candidates in the pharmaceutical industry in the future.

Investigating the possible association between NLRP3 gene polymorphisms and myasthenia gravis.

INTRODUCTION: In this case-control study, we investigated the association between nucleotide oligomerization domain-like receptor family pyrin domain containing 3 (NLRP3) single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) rs10754558, rs3806265, rs4612666, and rs35829419 and myasthenia gravis (MG). METHODS: Samples from MG patients were selected from a previous study conducted in our neuromuscular clinic, which investigated the association between human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class II genes and MG. Genetic data of controls were also available from another study. The NLRP3 SNPs genotyping was performed using the TaqMan method. RESULTS: A total of 93 blood samples from eligible Iranian patients with MG and 56 samples from healthy controls were obtained. The NLRP3 rs3806265 "C" allele was significantly more frequent in MG patients (P < .001; odd ratio [OR] = 2.33, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.4-4.0) than controls. The "CC" genotype of this SNP was found in 18.27% of patients, but none of the controls (P < .001). The distribution of other SNPs was similar between the groups. DISCUSSION: These preliminary results suggest that there might be some associations between the NLRP3 gene polymorphism and MG.

Investigating the Antifungal Effect of the Essential Oil of Thymus eriocalyx on Dominant Filamentous Fungal Agents Isolated from Livestock and Poultry Feed.

BACKGROUND: One of the most important principles in disease control is the health of livestock and poultry feed. Given the natural growth of Th. eriocalyx in Lorestan province, its essential oil can be added to the livestock and poultry feed and prevent the growth of the dominant filamentous fungi. OBJECTIVE: Therefore, this study aimed to identify the dominant moldy fungal agents of livestock and poultry feed, examine phytochemical compounds and analyze antifungal effects, anti-oxidant properties, as well as cytotoxicity against human white blood cells in Th. eriocalyx. METHODS: Sixty samples were collected in 2016. The PCR test was used to amplify ITS1 and ASP1 regions. The analysis of essential oil was conducted by gas chromatography and gas chromatographymass spectrometry devices. MIC and MFC were performed using the broth micro-dilution method. For the analysis of DDPH activity, DDPH was used. Cytotoxicity effect on healthy human lymphocytes was carried out by the MTT method. RESULTS: In this study, A. niger, F. verticilloides and F. circinatum, P. oxalicum, and P. chrysogenum were the most resistant species, and A. oryzae and A. fumigatus, F. prolifratum and F. eqiseti, P. janthnellum were the most susceptible ones. IC50 value of T. daenensis Celak was 41.33 µg/ml, and 100 µl/ml of the essential oil caused slight cell lysis. CONCLUSION: Considering our results, compared with drugs and chemical additives, essential oils can be added to livestock and poultry feed to prevent the growth of filamentous fungi in the livestock and poultry feed.

Uncertainty Inspired RGB-D Saliency Detection.

We propose the first stochastic framework to employ uncertainty for RGB-D saliency detection by learning from the data labeling process. Existing RGB-D saliency detection models treat this task as a point estimation problem by predicting a single saliency map following a deterministic learning pipeline. We argue that, however, the deterministic solution is relatively ill-posed. Inspired by the saliency data labeling process, we propose a generative architecture to achieve probabilistic RGB-D saliency detection which utilizes a latent variable to model the labeling variations. Our framework includes two main models: 1) a generator model, which maps the input image and latent variable to stochastic saliency prediction, and 2) an inference model, which gradually updates the latent variable by sampling it from the true or approximate posterior distribution. The generator model is an encoder-decoder saliency network. To infer the latent variable, we introduce two different solutions: i) a Conditional Variational Auto-encoder with an extra encoder to approximate the posterior distribution of the latent variable; and ii) an Alternating Back-Propagation technique, which directly samples the latent variable from the true posterior distribution. Qualitative and quantitative results on six challenging RGB-D benchmark datasets show our approach's superior performance in learning the distribution of saliency maps. The source code is publicly available via our project page: https://github.com/JingZhang617/UCNet.

Evaluation the effect of ZnO nanoparticle derived Bacillus subtilis on the expression of efflux pump genes (AdeB AdeRS) in Acinetobacter baumannii.

PURPOSE: Green approach to the nanoparticles, including metal oxides due to inevitable disadvantages of physical or chemical synthesis routes is attractive nowadays. Zink oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles play a key role in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. This research aimed to study the biologically synthesized ZnO nanoparticle using Bacillus subtilis, and evaluated its antibacterial properties. METHODS: Bacillus subtilis culture in a broth nutrient environment was used, followed by adding the Zinc acetate dehydrate. Biosynthesis of the nanoparticles was confirmed by the XRD, FTIR, and SEM imaging. The antibacterial effects of NPs on the expression of AdeB efflux pump genes and the AdeRS regulator were studied; clinical species of the Acinetobacter baumannii were collected from clinical samples of Khorramabad, using the phenotypic (MIC) and the genotypic methods through real-time PCR. RESULTS: X-ray diffraction pattern (XRD) result showed, that all of the peaks were related to the ZnO, and no other peaks were detected; it also demonstrated nanostructure nature with crystallite size of 25-50 nm. The results indicated, that the antibacterial properties of the nanoparticle increased the AdeRS expression and decreased the AdeB expression in 40% of the A. Baumannii. In addition, there was an increase in the AdeB expression in 60% of the species, indicating an increased probability for mutation. CONCLUSION: Given the desirable inhibitory effects of biosynthesized ZnO NPs on the expression of AdeB and AdeRS, which play an important role in the pharmaceutical resistance of Acinetobacter species, it seems that ZnO NPs can be used as a medication candidate in pharmaceutical industry in the future.

The Emergence of Quaternary Ammonium Compounds Resistance in Escherichia coli Isolated from Hospitals of Qazvin, Iran.

INTRODUCTION: Escherichia coli is one of the most important agents involved in healthcare-associated infection, and resistance to quantum ammonium compounds (QACs) has become a major challenge for infection control practitioners. The aim of the current study was to determine the frequency of qacE and qacEΔ1 genes in E. coli isolated from hospitalized patients in Qazvin, Iran. MATERIAL AND METHODS: In the current cross-sectional study, 102 E. coli were collected from hospitals of Qazvin. All bacterial isolates were identified using standard laboratory methods and the antimicrobial susceptibility was evaluated by Kirby-Baer test. The presence of qacE and qacEΔ1 genes was investigated using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. RESULTS: In this study, 65 (63.7%) isolates showed a multidrug resistance (MDR) pattern which was resistant to at least three classes of antimicrobials including ß-lactams, aminoglycosides, and fluoroquinolones. The highest rates of resistance were observed against cefotaxime (75.5%) and nalidixic acid (66.7%). The PCR showed that 5 (4.9%) isolates harbored qacE gene, 62 (60.8%) isolates qacEΔ1, and 10 (9.8%) isolates carried both genes, simultaneously. There was a significant relationship between the QACs resistance and MDR pattern (P=0.03). CONCLUSION: This study indicated a significant resistance rate against disinfectant compounds in the studied hospitals. However, more attention should be paid to this critical issue in the infection control committees of the hospitals.

CSF and blood biomarkers in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a highly progressive and debilitating neurodegenerative disease, which usually leads to the death of affected individuals within a few years after the onset of symptoms. ALS is currently incurable and very little is known about its pathophysiology. Finding validated biomarkers will help us to advance our understanding of ALS etiology and find better strategies for early diagnosis and management of the disease. The main aim of the present systematic review is to evaluate the concentration of 11 frequently reported biomarkers for ALS in peripheral blood and CSF of patients diagnosed with ALS compared with controls. METHODS: This systematic review protocol has been established according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocol (PRISMA-P) 2015 guideline. We will include all types of observational studies with human subjects that investigated the concentrations of intended biomarkers (amyloid beta (Aß-42), tau and phosphorylated tau (p-Tau), neurofilaments, S100ß, cystatin C, progranulin (PGRN), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), TAR DNA-binding protein-43 (TDP43), YKL-40, and CHIT1 in CSF or peripheral blood of ALS patients for initial assessment. Also, we will include case series with a minimum of 10 cases and clinical trials which have measured baseline biomarker levels. Case studies, case reports, reviews, letters, and animal and in vitro studies will be excluded. Multiple electronic databases including Cochrane Library, MEDLINE (PubMed), ISI Web of Science, and EMBASE will be searched to find all eligible articles published since 1980. No language restriction will be applied. All titles and abstracts retrieved by searching information sources will be evaluated independently by two authors against the eligibility criteria. The following information will be extracted from each included study by two independent authors: bibliographic details (first author, study title, year of publication, country), demographics and clinical information (number of patients and controls, type of ALS and controls, study design, age, gender, specimen, biomarkers levels, ALS functional rating scale Revised (ALSFRS-R), duration of disease), and measurements (method, value type, biomarkers levels). We will use the extracted mean and standard deviation (SD) of biomarkers concentrations to calculate the standardized mean difference (SMD) and 95% confidence intervals (CI). The primary outcome measures are the mean difference of biomarker levels between ALS patients and controls, different types of ALS, and ALS patients with genetic mutations. DISCUSSION: We will systematically review the literature and analyze studies of biomarker level in CSF and peripheral blood of patients with ALS and controls. The results will help us to identify biomarkers with possible diagnostic and prognostic value. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42017078127.

Incorporating Network Built-in Priors in Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation.

Pixel-level annotations are expensive and time consuming to obtain. Hence, weak supervision using only image tags could have a significant impact in semantic segmentation. Recently, CNN-based methods have proposed to fine-tune pre-trained networks using image tags. Without additional information, this leads to poor localization accuracy. This problem, however, was alleviated by making use of objectness priors to generate foreground/background masks. Unfortunately these priors either require pixel-level annotations/bounding boxes, or still yield inaccurate object boundaries. Here, we propose a novel method to extract accurate masks from networks pre-trained for the task of object recognition, thus forgoing external objectness modules. We first show how foreground/background masks can be obtained from the activations of higher-level convolutional layers of a network. We then show how to obtain multi-class masks by the fusion of foreground/background ones with information extracted from a weakly-supervised localization network. Our experiments evidence that exploiting these masks in conjunction with a weakly-supervised training loss yields state-of-the-art tag-based weakly-supervised semantic segmentation results.

Status of essential elements in autism spectrum disorder: systematic review and meta-analysis.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder that imposes heavy financial burden on governments and families of affected children. It is considered a multifactorial condition, where trace elements are among environmental factors that may contribute to ASD. Meanwhile, the between-study variance is high. The present systematic review was designed to investigate the difference in trace element measures between patients with ASD and control subjects. Meta-analyses showed that the hair concentrations of chromium (p=0.024), cobalt (p=0.012), iodine (p=0.000), iron (p=0.017), and magnesium (p=0.007) in ASD patients were significantly lower than those of control subjects, while there were higher magnesium levels in the hair of ASD patients compared to that of controls (p=0.010). Patients with ASD had higher blood levels of copper (p=0.000) and lower levels of zinc compared to controls (p=0.021). Further urinary iodine levels in patients with ASD were decreased in comparison with controls (p=0.026). Sensitivity analyses showed that ASD patients in non-Asian but not in Asian countries had lower hair concentrations of chromium compared to controls. Also, such analyses indicated that ASD patients in Asian countries had lower hair zinc concentrations, whereas ASD patients in non-Asian countries had higher hair zinc concentrations in comparison with control subjects. This study found significant differences in the content of trace elements between patients with ASD compared to controls. The findings help highlighting the role of trace elements as environmental factors in the etiology of ASD.