Green synthesis of curcumin-silver nanoparticle and its modified electrode assisted amperometric sensor for the determination of paracetamol.

Contamination of paracetamol, a primary analgesic was wide spread in the water system that affects the eco-system. High-dosage of paracetamol to humans cause organ damages and showed adverse effect. It is important to monitor the paracetamol concentration in environmental and human samples periodically. Conventional methods associated with chromatography is found to be high-cost, time consuming and requires high-end instrumentation, Herein, we investigated the role of curcumin during bio-synthesis of silver nanoparticles. The curcumin functionalized silver nanoparticles were further chemically modifying on the electrode surface and the resulting modified electrode was applied for electrocatalytic oxidation of paracetamol. The experimental finding proved that the modified electrode is capable of sensing paracetamol by applying oxidation potential 0.4 V. Both the synthesised material and modified electrode surface were characterized for its physic-chemical properties using spectroscopy and microscopy techniques. The HR-TEM, FESEM and AFM results showed that the distribution of nanoparticle with the size range from 25 to 70 nm and the UV-Vis and Raman spectrophotometer characterization confirms the coordination between SNP and curcumin. Under optimized condition, in 0.1 M NH4Cl (pH 7) at the scan rate of 50 mVs-1. The modified electrode enhanced the sensitivity towards the detection of paracetamol in trace level. The modified electrode is capable of sensing paracetamol in a linear range between 0.59 × 10-6 and 342.1 × 10-6 M, with LOD of 0.29 µM, and linear regression equation of y = 0.092x+502.6 with a correlation coefficient of R2 = 0.996.

One-year mortality outcomes and hospital readmissions of patients admitted with acute heart failure: Data from the Trivandrum Heart Failure Registry in Kerala, India.

BACKGROUND: There are sparse data on outcomes of patients with heart failure (HF) from India. The objective was to evaluate hospital readmissions and 1-year mortality outcomes of patients with HF in Kerala, India. METHODS: We followed 1,205 patients enrolled in the Trivandrum Heart Failure Registry for 1 year. A trained research nurse contacted each participant every 3 months using a structured questionnaire which included hospital readmission and mortality information. RESULTS: The mean (SD) age was 61.2 (13.7) years, and 31% were women. One out of 4 (26%) participants had HF with preserved ejection fraction. Only 25% of patients with HF with reduced ejection fraction received guideline-directed medical therapy at discharge. Cumulative all-cause mortality at 1 year was 30.8% (n = 371), but the greatest risk of mortality was in the first 3 months (18.1%). Most deaths (61%) occurred in patients younger than 70 years. One out of every 3 (30.2%) patients was readmitted at least once over 1 year. The hospital readmission rates were similar between HF with preserved ejection fraction and HF with reduced ejection fraction patients. New York Heart Association functional class IV status and lack of guideline-directed medical treatment after index hospitalization were associated with increased likelihood of readmission. Similarly, older age, lower education status, nonischemic etiology, history of stroke, higher serum creatinine, lack of adherence to guideline-directed medical therapy, and hospital readmissions were associated with increased 1-year mortality. CONCLUSIONS: In the Trivandrum Heart Failure Registry, 1 of 3 HF patients died within 1 year of follow-up during their productive life years. Suboptimal adherence to guideline-directed treatment is associated with increased propensity of readmission and death. Quality improvement programs aiming to improve adherence to guideline-based therapy and reducing readmission may result in significant survival benefits in the relatively younger cohort of HF patients in India.

Inferior Turbinate osteoma - rare cause of nasal obstruction.

Osteomas are common benign tumors of the paranasal sinus, with a predilection for the frontal sinus. We report a rare case of inferior turbinate osteoma in a 54 year old lady. The osteoma was resected completely by endoscopic sinus surgery and the patient was relieved of symptoms.

DNA-Prot: identification of DNA binding proteins from protein sequence information using random forest.

DNA-binding proteins (DNABPs) are important for various cellular processes, such as transcriptional regulation, recombination, replication, repair, and DNA modification. So far various bioinformatics and machine learning techniques have been applied for identification of DNA-binding proteins from protein structure. Only few methods are available for the identification of DNA binding proteins from protein sequence. In this work, we report a random forest method, DNA-Prot, to identify DNA binding proteins from protein sequence. Training was performed on the dataset containing 146 DNA-binding proteins and 250 non DNA-binding proteins. The algorithm was tested on the dataset containing 92 DNA-binding proteins and 100 non DNA-binding proteins. We obtained 80.31% accuracy from training and 84.37% accuracy from testing. Benchmarking analysis on the independent of 823 DNA-binding proteins and 823 non DNA-binding proteins shows that our approach can distinguish DNA-binding proteins from non DNA-binding proteins with more than 80% accuracy. We also compared our method with DNAbinder method on test dataset and two independent datasets. Comparable performance was observed from both methods on test dataset. In the benchmark dataset containing 823 DNA-binding proteins and 823 non DNA-binding proteins, we obtained significantly better performance from DNA-Prot with 81.83% accuracy whereas DNAbinder achieved only 61.42% accuracy using amino acid composition and 63.5% using PSSM profile. Similarly, DNA-Prot achieved better performance rate from the benchmark dataset containing 88 DNA-binding proteins and 233 non DNA-binding proteins. This result shows DNA-Prot can be efficiently used to identify DNA binding proteins from sequence information. The dataset and standalone version of DNA-Prot software can be obtained from http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/EPNSugan/index_files/dnaprot.htm.

Rosai-Dorfman disease mimicking chronic subdural hematoma.

Rosai-Dorfman disease (RDD), otherwise known as sinus histiocytosis with massive lymphadenopathy, is an uncommon, benign systemic histio-proliferative disease characterised by massive lymphadenopathy particularly in the head and neck region, and is often associated with extra-nodal involvement. We report a case in which RDD was mistaken for a chronic subdural hematoma and surgery was attempted.

Identification of catalytic residues from protein structure using support vector machine with sequence and structural features.

Identification of catalytic residues can provide valuable insights into protein function. With the increasing number of protein 3D structures having been solved by X-ray crystallography and NMR techniques, it is highly desirable to develop an efficient method to identify their catalytic sites. In this paper, we present an SVM method for the identification of catalytic residues using sequence and structural features. The algorithm was applied to the 2096 catalytic residues derived from Catalytic Site Atlas database. We obtained overall prediction accuracy of 88.6% from 10-fold cross validation and 95.76% from resubstitution test. Testing on the 254 catalytic residues shows our method can correctly predict all 254 residues. This result suggests the usefulness of our approach for facilitating the identification of catalytic residues from protein structures.

Reduced alphabet motif methodology for GPCR annotation.

Identification and Classification of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) using protein sequences is an important computational challenge, given that experimental screening of thousands of ligands is an expensive proposition. There are two distinct but complementary approaches to GPCR classification --machine learning and sequence motif analysis. Machine learning methodologies typically suffer from problems of class imbalance and lack of multi-class classification. Many sequence motif methods, meanwhile, are too dependent on the similarity of the primary sequence alignments. It is desirable to have a motif discovery and application methodology that is not strongly dependent on primary sequence similarity. It should also overcome limitations of machine learning. We propose and evaluate the effectiveness of a simple methodology that uses a reduced protein functional alphabet representation, where similar functional residues have similar symbols. Regular expression motifs can then be obtained by ClustalW based multiple sequence alignment, using an identity matrix. Since evolutionary matrices like BLOSUM, PAM are not used, this method can be useful for any set of sequences that do not necessarily share a common ancestry. Reduced alphabet motifs can accurately classify known GPCR proteins and the results are comparable to PRINTS and PROSITE. For well known GPCR proteins from SWISSPROT, there were no false negatives and only a few false positives. This methodology covers most currently known classes of GPCRs, even if there are very few representative sequences. It also predicts more than one class for certain sequences, thus overcoming the limitation of machine learning methods. We also annotated, 695 orphan receptors, and 121 were identified as belonging to Family A. A simple JavaScript based web interface has been developed to predict GPCR families and subfamilies (www.insilico-consulting.com/gpcrmotif.html).

Unraveling the mystery of Indian monsoon failure during El Niño .

The 132-year historical rainfall record reveals that severe droughts in India have always been accompanied by El Niño events. Yet El Niño events have not always produced severe droughts. We show that El Niño events with the warmest sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific are more effective in focusing drought-producing subsidence over India than events with the warmest SSTs in the eastern equatorial Pacific. The physical basis for such different impacts is established using atmospheric general circulation model experiments forced with idealized tropical Pacific warmings. These findings have important implications for Indian monsoon forecasting.

Adult intranasal meningoencephalocele presenting as a nasal polyp.

We present an isolated purely intranasal meningoencephalocele, presenting as a nasal polyp in an adult, which is uncommon. Based on a review of the literature, we emphasize that nasal obstruction may be the only presenting symptom of an intranasal meningoencephalocele.