Tailoring Core-Shell Metal Coordination for Smart Seed Coatings in Sustainable Agriculture.

The international agriculture and food security sector is grappling with challenges like low crop yields, soil health deficiencies, and inefficient agrochemical use. The application of smart nanotechnology in agriculture, particularly surface functionalization, holds promise but has limited implementation. Engineered nanomaterials used as seed treatments, known as nanopriming, offer a simple technology to improve crop yield and stress tolerance. In this study, a multicomponent platform called Phelm (Phenolic network with a lipid core and metal coordinated shell) is proposed for encapsulating a commercial plant growth regulator, indole-3 acetic acid (IAA). Phelm comprises a hydrophobic solid lipid core, loaded with IAA, and an outer metal coordinated phenolic shell of tannic acid (TA) and Fe3+. The platform aims to treat seeds with encapsulated IAA, which can be controllably released, as well as protect the germination process at high salt concentrations. Phelm showed a remarkable increase in growth parameters of wheat seeds up to 58.6%, despite being irrigated with high concentrations of saltwater (100 mM). These findings suggest that nanopriming of seeds can effectively increase their efficacy even under abiotic stress conditions, which can drastically improve crop yields. Moreover, we envisage that the Phelm core/shell assembly can encapsulate a wide range of agrochemicals and biostimulants to promote sustainable and smart agricultural practices.

Polycage membranes for precise molecular separation and catalysis.

The evolution of the chemical and pharmaceutical industry requires effective and less energy-intensive separation technologies. Engineering smart materials at a large scale with tunable properties for molecular separation is a challenging step to materialize this goal. Herein, we report thin film composite membranes prepared by the interfacial polymerization of porous organic cages (POCs) (RCC3 and tren cages). Ultrathin crosslinked polycage selective layers (thickness as low as 9.5 nm) are obtained with high permeance and strict molecular sieving for nanofiltration. A dual function is achieved by combining molecular separation and catalysis. This is demonstrated by impregnating the cages with highly catalytically active Pd nanoclusters ( ~ 0.7 nm). While the membrane promotes a precise molecular separation, its catalytic activity enables surface self-cleaning, by reacting with any potentially adsorbed dye and recovering the original performance. This strategy opens opportunities for the development of other smart membranes combining different functions and well-tailored abilities.

Outcomes of radical surgical resections for nonmetastatic anorectal melanomas: Experience from a tertiary care centre.

AIM: The outcome of radical surgery in nonmetastatic anorectal melanoma (AM) patients is studied infrequently. Here, we aimed to explore the stage-wise outcomes and the impact of radical resections in these patients. METHODS: In this single-centre retrospective study, data of 154 eligible patients were recorded and analysed. Data were obtained from November 2010 to September 2019 with follow-up until November 2020. Overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS) was calculated by Kaplan Meir method and univariate analysis of prognostic factors by Cox regression. RESULTS: Of 154 patients, 110 were metastatic (stage III) and 44 were nonmetastatic (stage I:22, stage II:22) and underwent curative resections. Median follow-up was 48 months (14-119 months). A total of 39 patients underwent total mesorectal excisions (TME) and five transanal excision (TAE) were performed. Seven patients underwent extended resections. Stage I and II patients had 3- and 5-year OS of 40% and 36%; and DFS of 45% and 33.2%, respectively. Median OS and DFS were 31 and 24 months, respectively. Stage II (node-positive) patients had better median OS compared to stage III (21 vs. 4 months; p = 0.000), and 54.5% patients had recurrences, most commonly both systemic and nodal (45.83%). Median OS of patients without recurrence was 34 months. CONCLUSION: In this large surgical series of AMs, outcome in stage I and II patients was significantly better than stage III and patients with stage II disease can have acceptable oncological outcomes. Radical surgical resections with or without lymphadenectomy could be considered in these patients. The role of adjuvant systemic therapy and radiation needs to be explored as part of multimodality treatment.

Hyperammonemia after Cytoreductive Surgery and Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy: A Report of Three Cases with Unusual Presentation.

Cytoreductive surgery (CRS) with hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) is a treatment modality for peritoneal surface malignancies. A variety of metabolic derangements have been reported in the perioperative period in these patients, most of which are a result of the complex interaction of peritoneal denudation, chemotherapy bath, and fluid imbalance. We report three cases of hyperammonemia-related neurological dysfunction seen in HIPEC patients. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of this presentation. Timely recognition of this condition needs a high degree of suspicion, and unless aggressively treated, is likely to be associated with poor outcome. How to cite this article: Sharma V, Solanki SL, Saklani AP. Hyperammonemia after Cytoreductive Surgery and Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy: A Report of Three Cases with Unusual Presentation. Indian J Crit Care Med 2021;25(5):590-593.

Organic cage supported metal nanoparticles for applications.

Porous shape-persistent organic cages can anchor metal nanoparticles either inside the cavity or in the external cavity generated through self-assembly. The size of these nanoparticles range from 1-2 nm depending upon the host and can be controlled within a narrow size distribution. The nanoparticles thus formed are quite stable as they are segregated efficiently preventing their association and eventual precipitation. These fine nanoparticles are found to be quite effective in catalyzing a number of organic transformations besides showing interesting emission properties.

Identifying Herbal Adverse Events From Spontaneous Reporting Systems Using Taxonomic Name Resolution Approach.

The efficacy and safety of herbal supplements suffer from challenges due to non-uniform representation of ingredient terms within biomedical and observational health data sources. The nature of how supplement data are reported within Spontaneous Reporting Systems (SRS) can limit analyses of supplement-associated adverse events due to the use of incorrect nomenclature or failing to identify herbs. This study aimed to extract, standardize, and summarize supplement-relevant reports from two SRSs: (1) Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) and (2) Canada Vigilance Adverse Reaction (CVAR) database. A thesaurus of plant names was developed and integrated with a mapping and normalization approach that accommodated misspellings and variants. The reports gathered from FAERS between the years 2004 and 2016 show 185,915 herbal and 7,235,330 non-herbal accounting for 2.51%. The data from CVAR found 36,940 reports of herbal and 503,580 non-herbal reports between the years 1965 and 2017 for a total of 6.83%. Although not all cases were actual adverse events due to numerous variables and incomplete reporting, it is interesting to note that the herbs most frequently reported and significantly associated with adverse events were as follows: Avena sativa (Oats), Cannabis sativa (marijuana), Digitalis purpurea (foxglove), Humulus lupulus (hops), Hypericum perforatum (St John's Wort), Paullinia cupana (guarana), Phleum pretense (timothy-grass), Silybum marianum (milk thistle), Taraxacum officinale (Dandelion), and Valeriana officinalis (valerian). Using a scalable approach for mapping and resolution of herb names allowed data-driven exploration of potential adverse events from sources that have remained isolated in this specific area of research. The results from this study highlight several herb-associated safety issues providing motivation for subsequent in-depth analyses, including those that focus on the scope and severity of potential safety issues with supplement use.

Flexibility Induced Encapsulation of Ultrafine Palladium Nanoparticles into Organic Cages for Tsuji-Trost Allylation.

A series of three positional isomers of organic cages namely o-OC, m-OC, and p-OC, have been self-assembled using dynamic covalent chemistry. Their room temperature controlled fabrication with palladium gives ultrafine diameter (1-2 nm) of palladium nanoparticles (Pd NPs). We observed that the shape-flexibility of cages have great impact on the formation of Pd NPs. Theoretical calculations reveals that theoretically obtainable size of Pd NPs for each cage which was complementary to the experimental results. Theoretical studies indicate that the driving forces for the specific orientational preference may be ascribed to subtle variations on the level of π-π interactions, which ultimately governs the growth of Pd NPs therein. It is the first example of shape-flexible synthesis of organic cages where flexibility governs the nanoparticle growth. Pd NPs have shown excellent catalysis of Tsuji-Trost allylation at room temperature and pressure in water.

Solr-Plant: efficient extraction of plant names from text.

BACKGROUND: The retrieval of plant-related information is a challenging task due to variations in species name mentions as well as spelling or typographical errors across data sources. Scalable solutions are needed for identifying plant name mentions from text and resolving them to accepted taxonomic names. RESULTS: An Apache Solr-based fuzzy matching system enhanced with the Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm ("Solr-Plant") was developed for mapping and resolution to a plant name and synonym thesaurus. Evaluation of Solr-Plant suggests promising results in terms of both accuracy and processing efficiency on misspelled species names from two benchmark datasets: (1) SALVIAS and (2) National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Taxonomy. Additional evaluation using S800 text corpus also reflects high precision and recall. The latest version of the source code is available at https://github.com/bcbi/SolrPlantAPI . A REST-compliant web interface and service for Solr-Plant is hosted at http://bcbi.brown.edu/solrplant . CONCLUSION: Automated techniques are needed for efficient and accurate identification of knowledge linked with biological scientific names. Solr-Plant complements the current state-of-the-art in terms of both efficiency and accuracy in identification of names restricted at species level. The approach can be extended to identify broader groups of organisms at different taxonomic levels. The results reflect potential utility of Solr-Plant as a data mining tool for extracting and correcting plant species names.

Benzothiazole integrated into a cryptand for ESIPT-based selective chemosensor for Zn2+ ions.

A novel benzothiazole-based cryptand was designed and synthesized, and it exhibited high fluorescence intensity in the presence of Zn2+ ions based on the metal chelation inhibition of the excited state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT) process. The structure of the cryptand was confirmed by NMR, mass spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography. Importantly, this probe showed high selectivity over other biologically relevant metal ions and anions and a detection limit of 0.20 µM, which is acceptable within the EPA (US) limit.

Identifying Supplement Use Within Clinical Notes: An Applicationof Natural Language Processing.

Recent statistics indicate that the use of dietary supplements has increased over the years. Although being popular among consumers who use them for a variety of reasons, there have been limited clinical data-driven studies of the impact of dietary supplements on health outcomes. Challenges that impede such analyses in a comprehensive manner include either the sequestered nature of such data or their embedding within biomedical and clinical text. This study explored the feasibility to uncover patterns in the use of supplements, focusing on vitamin use among patients diagnosed with mental illness within patient records from the MIMIC-III database. The relevance of vitamin(s) was calculated at different levels of granularity and compared with association identified from Dietary Supplement Subset of MEDLINE. The results reveal insights into vitamin use for specific mental health related diagnosis and highlight challenges with identifying supplement information from clinical sources.

A Multifunctional Metal-Organic Framework for Oxidative C-O Coupling Involving Direct C-H Activation and Synthesis of Quinolines.

A robust paddle-wheel Cu(II)-based metal-organic framework (MOF) 1, having dual functionalities, namely, Lewis acid and basic sites, has been explored as a heterogeneous catalyst. This MOF, because of its large void volume (10298 Å3, 67.6%), large surface area (1480 m2/g), and high thermal stability, encouraged us to see its applicability in two catalytic reactions, namely, oxidative C-O coupling (cross-dehydrogentaive coupling reaction) involving direct C-H activation and Friedländer reaction under solvent free and ambient conditions. This study demonstrates the green aspect of MOFs in coupling reactions because of the simplified recovery, shorter reaction time, minimum waste, and smooth activation of the C-H bond, which is very challenging in synthetic chemistry.

Identifying natural health product and dietary supplement information within adverse event reporting systems.

Data on safety and efficacy issues associated with natural health products and dietary supplements (NHP&S) remains largely cloistered within domain specific databases or embedded within general biomedical data sources. A major challenge in leveraging analytic approaches on such data is due to the inefficient ability to retrieve relevant data, which includes a general lack of interoperability among related sources. This study developed a thesaurus of NHP&S ingredient terms that can be used by existing biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tools for extracting information of interest. This process was evaluated relative to intervention name strings sampled from the United States Food and Drug Administration Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). A use case was used to demonstrate the potential to utilize FAERS for monitoring NHP&S adverse events. The results from this study provide insights on approaches for identifying additional knowledge from extant repositories of knowledge, and potentially as information that can be included into larger curation efforts.

A Cu(ii)-MOF capable of fixing CO2 from air and showing high capacity H2 and CO2 adsorption.

A porous Cu(ii)-MOF shows an adsorption of 6.6 wt% of H2 at 77 K and 62 bar and a very high 60 wt% of CO2 at 298 K and 32 bar. When air is bubbled into a suspension of the activated MOF in the presence of different epoxides at room temperature, the CO2 in air is readily converted into the corresponding cyclic carbonates.

A 2D Coordination Network That Detects Nitro Explosives in Water, Catalyzes Baylis-Hillman Reactions, and Undergoes Unusual 2D→3D Single-Crystal to Single-Crystal Transformation.

The solvothermal reaction of Zn(NO3)2·6H2O and a linear dicarboxylate ligand H2L, in the presence of urotropine in N,N'-dimethylformamide (DMF), gives rise to a new porous two-dimensional (2D) coordination network, {[Zn3(L)3(urotropine)2]·2DMF·3H2O}n (1), with hxl topology. Interestingly, framework 1 exhibits excellent emission properties owing to the presence of naphthalene moiety in the linker H2L, that can be efficiently suppressed by subtle quantity of nitro explosives in aqueous medium. Furthermore, presence of urotropine molecules bound to the metal centers, 1 is found to be an excellent heterogeneous catalyst meant for atom-economical C-C bond-forming Baylis-Hillman reactions. Additionally, crystals of 1 undergo complete transmetalation with Cu(II) to afford isostructural 1Cu. Moreover, the 2D framework of 1 allows replacement of urotropine molecules by 4,4'-azopyridine (azp) linker resulting in a three-dimensional (3D) metal-organic framework, {[Zn(L)(azp)]·4DMF 2H2O}n (2). The 1→2 transformation takes place in single-crystal-to-single crystal manner supported by powder X-ray diffraction, atomic force microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and morphological studies. Remarkably, during this 2D→3D transformation, the original trinuclear [Zn3(COO)6] secondary building unit changes to a mononuclear node, which is unprecedented.

Harnessing Biomedical Natural Language Processing Tools to Identify Medicinal Plant Knowledge from Historical Texts.

The growing amount of data describing historical medicinal uses of plants from digitization efforts provides the opportunity to develop systematic approaches for identifying potential plant-based therapies. However, the task of cataloguing plant use information from natural language text is a challenging task for ethnobotanists. To date, there have been only limited adoption of informatics approaches used for supporting the identification of ethnobotanical information associated with medicinal uses. This study explored the feasibility of using biomedical terminologies and natural language processing approaches for extracting relevant plant-associated therapeutic use information from historical biodiversity literature collection available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results from this preliminary study suggest that there is potential utility of informatics methods to identify medicinal plant knowledge from digitized resources as well as highlight opportunities for improvement.

Identifying Plant-Human Disease Associations in Biomedical Literature: A Case Study.

The impact of ethnobotanical data from surveys of traditional medicinal uses ofplants can be enhanced through the validation of biomedical knowledge that may be embedded in literature. This study aimed to explore the use of informatics approaches, including natural language processing and terminology resources, for extracting and comparing ethnobotanical leads from biomedical literature indexed in MEDLINE. Using ethnobotanical data for plant species described in Primary Health Care Manuals of the Micronesian islands of Palau and Pohnpei, the results of this study were done relative to disease concepts from the "Mental, Behavioral And Neurodevelopmental Disorders " ICD-9-CM category. The results from this feasibility study suggest that informatics methods can be used to extract and prioritize relevant ethnobotanical information from biomedical knowledge literature.

Identifying Complementary and Alternative Medicine Usage Information from Internet Resources. A Systematic Review.

OBJECTIVES: Identify and highlight research issues and methods used in studying Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) information needs, access, and exchange over the Internet. METHODS: A literature search was conducted using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines from PubMed to identify articles that have studied Internet use in the CAM context. Additional searches were conducted at Nature.com and Google Scholar. RESULTS: The Internet provides a major medium for attaining CAM information and can also serve as an avenue for conducting CAM related surveys. Based on the literature analyzed in this review, there seems to be significant interest in developing methodologies for identifying CAM treatments, including the analysis of search query data and social media platform discussions. Several studies have also underscored the challenges in developing approaches for identifying the reliability of CAM-related information on the Internet, which may not be supported with reliable sources. The overall findings of this review suggest that there are opportunities for developing approaches for making available accurate information and developing ways to restrict the spread and sale of potentially harmful CAM products and information. CONCLUSIONS: Advances in Internet research are yet to be used in context of understanding CAM prevalence and perspectives. Such approaches may provide valuable insights into the current trends and needs in context of CAM use and spread.

Telementoring: an Overview and Our Preliminary Experience in the Setting Up of a Cost-effective Telementoring Facility.

Telementoring as a subset of telemedicine has evolved over the past few years, but it is yet to be utilized to its full potential. The technology holds promise in bridging divides of distance and enables far-flung areas to be mentored in operative advances. It thus has a special bearing in countries like India where health care is short staffed and many areas lack availability of quality care. We describe the setting up of a telementoring facility at our centre. As against a 'routine' facility with dedicated equipments which cost heavily, our facility was set up using mostly equipments commonly available in an operating room. The facility is presently functional and allows telementoring through an encrypted Web-based service. Our set-up design can be emulated in centres with financial constraint and can help raise the standard of surgical care.

Secretory Carcinoma of the Breast: Report of Two Cases and Review of the Literature.

Secretory carcinoma of the breast is an extremely rare subtype of breast cancer characterized by intracellular or extracellular secretion and granular eosinophilic cytoplasm of the neoplastic cells. The disease which was considered to be predominant in younger age group has been recognized in adult population too and tends to show slow growth and indolent behavior. The disease occurs preferentially in females and only 27 cases have been reported amongst males. An optimal treatment for the disease subtype has been debated because of the paucity of data. We report two cases (one female and one male) of this rare disease that underwent treatment at our institution.