Cost-effective and earth-friendly chemometrics-assisted spectrophotometric methods for simultaneous determination of Acetaminophen and Ascorbic Acid in pharmaceutical formulation.

The development of analytical chemistry is omnipresent in all fields, this leads to considerable consumption of organic solvents and hazardous reagents with an increase in the production of waste to be treated. In this work, we developed simple, fast, cost-effective and above all environmentally friendly methods for the analysis of Acetaminophen (ACT) and Ascorbic acid (ASC) in synthetic mixtures and pharmaceutical formulation, using UV spectroscopy. Four chemometric methods were studied, including PLS-1 with full-spectrum (Full-PLS) and PLS-1 using three variable selection methods, namely subset selection through a genetic algorithm (GA), uninformative variable elimination using iterative predictor weighting (IPW), and variable selection by sub-window permutation analysis (SwPA). The accuracy of the developed methods was evaluated through the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP), the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the recovery values. All methods showed more accurate prediction results in comparison with full-PLS calibration. Furthermore, the results indicate that the GA-PLS models showed the highest prediction accuracy among all other models with RMSEP and MAPE values of (0.0494 and 0.610) and (0.0163 and 0.321) for the estimation of ACT and ASC, respectively. The proposed methods were successfully applied to the determination of ACT and ASC in their combined dosage form. In addition, the results obtained were statistically compared to those of the conventionally used HPLC method and were found to be in good agreement. The main advantages of the developed methods over HPLC during routine analysis are that they are faster, inexpensive, simple to perform, without the need for major pretreatment of samples. Besides, no organic solvents are used, and thus toxicity and pollution are avoided.

Survey of bovine mycotic mastitis in different mammary gland statuses in two north-eastern regions of Algeria.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of mycotic mastitis in different mammary gland statuses. The study was conducted on 304 dairy cows from ten farms in two north-eastern regions in Algeria; Guelma and Souk Ahras with 922 and 199 samples, respectively, forming thus a total number of 1,121 milk samples. A total of 321 milk samples were collected from clinical mastitis, 544 milk samples from subclinical mastitis and 256 milk samples from healthy mammary glands. Mycological analyses revealed that 10.17% of the treated samples were positive recording 114 species of fungi including 88 yeasts and 26 moulds. The most frequent species was Candida kefyr followed by C. albicans, C. guilliermondii, C. famata, C. tropicalis, C. colliculosa, C. krusei, C. rugosa, C. glabrata, C. parapsilosis, C. inconspicua, Trichosporon sp., Rhodotorula glutinis and Saccharomyces fragilis. Mould species have also been isolated from samples of both healthy milk and clinical mastitis milk. Aspergillus amstelodami (from glaucus group), A. fumigatus and Geotrichum candidum were identified, while the other species including Penicillium sp. and Cladosporium sp. were not identified.

Compositions and antifungal activities of essential oils of some Algerian aromatic plants.

Essential oils extracted from ten Algerian plants were analyzed for their potential activity against Candida albicans. The highest efficiency was obtained with the essential oil from Thymus numidicus which showed antifungal effect 1357 fold stronger than that measured with amphotericin B.