Gamma radiation dose rate distribution in the Anand, Bharuch, Vadodara, and Narmada districts of Gujarat, India.

Radiation is present everywhere in the earth, and human beings are continuously exposed to gamma radiation. The health consequences of environmental radiation exposure are a serious societal issue. The purpose of this study was to analyse outdoor radiation in four districts of Gujarat, India: Anand, Bharuch, Narmada, and Vadodara during summer and winter seasons. This study illustrated the influence of lithology of areas on gamma radiation dose values. Summer and winter seasons are the primary factors that alter the causes directly or indirectly; therefore, the influence of season fluctuation on radiation dose rate was investigated. The annual dose rate and mean gamma radiation dose rate values from four districts were found to be greater than the global population weight average value. The mean value of gamma radiation dose rate from 439 locations in the summer and winter seasons was 136.23 nSv/h and 141.58 nSv/h, respectively. According to a paired differences sample study, the significance value between outdoor gamma dose rate in summer and winter seasons was 0.05 indicating that seasons have a significant impact on gamma radiation dose rate. The impact of various types of lithology on gamma radiation dose was studied in all 439 places, and the statistical analysis revealed that there was no significant association between lithology and gamma radiation dose rate in the summer season, but a relationship between lithology and gamma dose rate was observed in the winter season.

Management of Gingival Recession by Coronally Advanced Flap with and Without Amniotic Membrane: A Clinical Study.

Purpose: Recently, human amniotic membrane (AM) has been reported to have regenerative potential that facilitate repair in the field of oral and periodontal surgeries. Methods: Eighteen subjects with bilateral Miller's class I gingival recession defects were selected. Subjects were allocated randomly to treatment with coronally positioned flap + amnion allograft (test group) and coronally positioned flap alone (control group). The clinical parameters used in this study were width of attached gingiva (AG), clinical attachment level (CAL), pocket depth (PD), width of keratinized gingiva (WKG), length of gingival recession (RL), width of gingival recession (RW). Results: The mean width of attached gingiva at the control sites (A) was found to be 1.33 ± 0.50 mm (range 1.00-2.00), 2.00 ± 0.71 mm (range 2.00-3.00) and 2.22 ± 0.67 mm (range 2.00-3.00) on day 0, 90 and 180, respectively. Thus, it was increased by 0.67 mm and 0.89 mm on day 90 and 180 compared to that of the baseline, which are 50% and 67%, respectively. Conclusions: It can be concluded that combined coronally advanced flap and amniotic membrane have additional advantage in the outcome of periodontal therapy in the management of gingival recession.

Multifractal Alterations in Oral Sub-Epithelial Connective Tissue During Progression of Pre-Cancer and Cancer.

Bright-field microscopy (BFM) encrypts the optical transillumination profile of the transmitted light attenuated by the complex micro-structural tissue convolutions, manifested by the dense and compact regions of the specimen under examination. The connotations of idiosyncratic tissue interaction dynamics with the onset of pre-cancerous activity are encoded in the BFM acquired oral mucosa histopathological images (OMHI). In the present study, our analysis is focused on the sub-epithelium region of the oral mucosa, which has high clinical significance but sparsely explored in the literature from the textural domain. Histopathology being the gold-standard technique till date, we have used the light microscopic histopathology images for tissue characterization. The tissue-index transmission patches (TITP) from the sub-epithelium region are cropped under the guidance of oral onco-pathologists. After that, the TITPs are characterized for its multi-scale spatial-deformation dynamics, while keeping the intrinsic anisotropic geometry, and local contour connectivity within tolerable limits. With recent studies exhibiting multifractal's potency in diverse biological system analysis, here, we exploit the 2D multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (2D-MFDFA) on TITPs for exploring a discriminative set of multifractal signatures for healthy, oral potentially malignant disorders and oral cancer tissue sample. The predictive model's competency is validated on an experimentally collected corpus of TITP samples and substantiated via confirmatory data statistics and analysis, showing its inter-class segregation efficacy. Moreover, the 2D-MFDFA analysis evinces the complex multifractal patterns in TITPs, which is due to the presence of composite long-range correlations in the oral mucosa tissue fabric.

Evaluation of biomolecular interactions and cytotoxic activity of organometallic binuclear Ru(II) complexes of ferrocenyl thiosemicarbazones.

Four new ferrocenyl substituted thiosemicarbazone ligands (L1-L4) and their corresponding binuclear ruthenium(II) arene complexes of the general type [(η6-p cym)(L)Ru(µ-im)Ru(L)(η6-p-cym)]Cl (C1-C4) and [(η6-p cym)(L)Ru(µ-azpy)Ru(L)(η6-p-cym)]Cl2 (C5-C8) (cym = cymene, im = imidazole, azpy = 4,4'-azopyridine) have been synthesized and characterized. The structures of the complexes were established through DFT calculations and geometry optimization. The interactions of the binuclear complexes with DNA were investigated by absorption, emission and viscosity studies which indicated that the complexes bind to DNA via intercalation. Meanwhile, the interaction of complexes with the protein, bovine serum albumin (BSA), has also been studied using fluorescence emission spectroscopy. The experimental results show that the binuclear complexes exhibit good binding propensities to BSA. The complexes can quench the intrinsic fluorescence of BSA remarkably through a static or dynamic quenching process. In addition, the in vitro cytotoxicity of complexes C1-C8 against HeLa cell line was assayed which showed lower IC50 values indicating their higher cytotoxicity and potency in killing the cancer cells at low concentrations.Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.

Malignant potentiality assessment of oral submucous fibrosis through semi-quantitative approach.

BACKGROUND: In the context of early diagnosis and prevention of oral cancer, precise assessment of malignant potentiality of the oral potentially malignant disorders, particularly oral submucous fibrosis (OSF) is crucial. Till date, the assessment of malignant potentiality suffers from predictive ambiguity due to the lack of precision in the gold standard techniques. This can be addressed by integrating heuristic domain knowledge with quantitative analysis. AIM: The aim of this study is to propose an index for enhancing accuracy in malignant potentiality evaluation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The present study analyzes important histomorphometric attributes (epithelial thickness, basal cell nuclear size, nuclear-to-cytoplasmic area ratio of basal cells, chromaticity of basal cell nucleus, thickness of basement membrane, ratio of vasculature in juxta-epithelial connective tissue [i.e., area covered by blood vessels/total area], collagen density in the lamina propria) of oral mucosa in dysplastic and nondysplastic OSF in association with relevant oncopathological appreciations (weightage of different features as suggested by oral pathologists) toward proposing a "Malignant Potentiality Index" (MPI). RESULTS: Analysis of variance and notch box plot analysis depict statistically significant differences (P < 0.0001) in the histopathological features among different study groups (normal oral mucosa, OSF without dysplasia, OSF with dysplasia). Histopathological observation of one OSF patient with calculated MPI is shown. CONCLUSION: This newly proposed diagnostic cum prognostic decision-making parameter, the "MPI" may bring a value addition to the conventional diagnostic gold standard.

Elucidation of Differential Nano-Textural Attributes for Normal Oral Mucosa and Pre-Cancer.

Computational analysis on altered micro-nano-textural attributes of the oral mucosa may provide precise diagnostic information about oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMDs) instead of an existing handful of qualitative reports. This study evaluated micro-nano-textural features of oral epithelium from scanning electron microscopic (SEM) images and the sub-epithelial connective tissue from light microscopic (LM) and atomic force microscopic (AFM) images for normal and OPMD (namely oral sub-mucous fibrosis, i.e., OSF). Objective textural descriptors, namely discrete wavelet transform, gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), and local binary pattern (LBP), were extracted and fed to standard classifiers. Best classification accuracy of 87.28 and 93.21%; sensitivity of 93 and 96%; specificity of 80 and 91% were achieved, respectively, for SEM and AFM. In the study groups, SEM analysis showed a significant (p < 0.01) variation for all the considered textural descriptors, while for AFM, a remarkable alteration (p < 0.01) was only found in GLCM and LBP. Interestingly, sub-epithelial collagen nanoscale and microscale textural information from AFM and LM images, respectively, were complementary, namely microlevel contrast was more in normal (0.251) than OSF (0.193), while nanolevel contrast was more in OSF (0.283) than normal (0.204). This work, thus, illustrated differential micro-nano-textural attributes for oral epithelium and sub-epithelium to distinguish OPMD precisely and may be contributory in early cancer diagnostics.

Transfer learning based classification of optical coherence tomography images with diabetic macular edema and dry age-related macular degeneration.

We present an algorithm for identifying retinal pathologies given retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. Our approach fine-tunes a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN), GoogLeNet, to improve its prediction capability (compared to random initialization training) and identifies salient responses during prediction to understand learned filter characteristics. We considered a data set containing subjects with diabetic macular edema, or dry age-related macular degeneration, or no pathology. The fine-tuned CNN could effectively identify pathologies in comparison to classical learning. Our algorithm aims to demonstrate that models trained on non-medical images can be fine-tuned for classifying OCT images with limited training data.

Environmental DNA-encoded antibiotics fasamycins A and B inhibit FabF in type II fatty acid biosynthesis.

In a recent study of polyketide biosynthetic gene clusters cloned directly from soil, we isolated two antibiotics, fasamycins A and B, which showed activity against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis. To identify the target of the fasamycins, mutants with elevated fasamycin A minimum inhibitory concentrations were selected from a wild-type culture of E. faecalis OG1RF. Next-generation sequencing of these mutants, in conjunction with in vitro biochemical assays, showed that the fasamycins inhibit FabF of type II fatty acid biosynthesis (FASII). Candidate gene overexpression studies also showed that fasamycin resistance is conferred by fabF overexpression. On the basis of comparisons with known FASII inhibitors and in silico docking studies, the chloro-gem-dimethyl-anthracenone substructure seen in the fasamycins is predicted to represent a naturally occurring FabF-specific antibiotic pharmacophore. Optimization of this pharmacophore should yield FabF-specific antibiotics with increased potencies and differing spectra of activity. This study demonstrates that culture-independent antibiotic discovery methods have the potential to provide access to novel metabolites with modes of action that differ from those of antibiotics currently in clinical use.

Facile synthesis and altered ionization efficiency of diverse Nε-alkyllysine-containing peptides.

Protein lysine methylation is a biologically-important posttranslational modification. Given the increased use of alkyllysine-containing peptides to study protein methylation, we describe an efficient solid-phase synthesis to access various alkyllysine-containing peptides. As an exemplary application, we evaluated how ionization efficiency of the alkyllysine peptides affects mass spectrometric analysis.

Isolation and expression analysis of partial sequences of heavy metal transporters from Brassica juncea by coupling high throughput cloning with a molecular fingerprinting technique.

Heavy metal transporters play a key role in regulating metal accumulation and transport in plants. These are important candidate genes to study in metal tolerant and accumulator plants for their potential use in environmental clean up. We coupled a degenerate primer-based RT-PCR approach with a molecular fingerprinting technique based on amplified rDNA restriction analysis (ARDRA) to identify novel ESTs corresponding to heavy metal transporters from metal accumulator Brassica juncea. We utilized this technique to clone several family members of natural resistance-associated macrophage proteins (NRAMP) and yellow stripe-like proteins (YSL) in a high throughput manner to distinguish between closely related isoforms and/or allelic variants from the allopolyploid B. juncea. Partial clones of 23 Brassica juncea NRAMPs and 27 YSLs were obtained with similarity to known Arabidopsis thaliana and Noccaea (Thlaspi) caerulescens NRAMP and YSL genes. The cloned transporters showed Brassica-specific changes in domains, which can have important functional consequences. Semi-quantitative RT-PCR-based expression analysis of chosen members indicated that even closely related isoforms/allelic variants of BjNRAMP and BjYSL have distinct tissue-specific and metal-dependent expressions which might be essential for adaptive fitness and heavy metal tolerance. Consistent to this, BjYSL6.1 and BjYSL5.8 were found to show elevated expressions specifically in cadmium-treated shoots and lead-treated roots of B. juncea, respectively.