Cervicitis is one of the major health problems amongst women caused by infection of various pathogens including Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG), Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) as ...well as human papillomavirus (HPV), and persistent cervical inflammation is one of the etiologic agents of cervical cancer. Toll-like receptors (TLRs) play an important role in the recognition and subsequent elimination of these pathogens. Variations in the Toll-like receptor genes influence susceptibility to pathogens as well as disease progression independently.
Ten single nucleotide polymorphisms, five each of TLR4 and TLR9 genes were analyzed among 130 cervicitis patients and 150 controls either using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism or allele specific-PCR.
T. vaginalis infection was found at the highest frequency (30.7%) as compared to C. trachomatis (1.5%), N. gonorrhoeae (2.3%) and HPV (4.6%) infections in cervicitis patients. TLR4 rs11536889 CC (age-adjusted OR, 2.469 95% CI, 1.499 to 4.065; p < 0.001) and TLR9 rs187084 TC (age-adjusted OR, 2.165 95% CI, 1.267-3.699; p = 0.005) genotypes showed the higher distribution in cervicitis patients compared to controls. In addition, TLR4 rs11536889 C allele was shown to increase the risk of cervicitis (age-adjusted OR, 1.632 95% CI, 1.132 to 2.352; p = 0.009) compared to controls. The TLR4 haplotype GCA (OR, 0.6 95% CI, 0.38-0.95; p = 0.0272) and TLR9 haplotype GTA (OR, 1.99 95% CI, 1.14-3.48; p = 0.014) were found to be associated with decreased and increased risk of cervicitis respectively.
TLR4 and TLR9 polymorphisms, as well as haplotypes were shown to modulate the cervicitis risk.
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in TLR genes may serve as a crucial marker for early susceptibility of various cancers including cervical cancer. The present study was therefore designed to ...ascertain the role of TLR4 and TLR9 SNPs and haplotypes to hrHPV infection and cervical cancer susceptibility. The study included 110 cervical cancer biopsies and 141 cervical smears from age-matched healthy controls of Gujarati ethnicity of Western India. hrHPV 16 and 18 were detected using Real-time PCR. Eight SNPs, four each in TLR4 and TLR9 were analyzed using Polymerase Chain Reaction-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism and Allele-Specific PCR. HPV 16 and 18 were detected in 68% cervical cancer cases. TLR4 rs4986790, rs1927911 and TLR9 rs187084 showed association with HPV 16/18 infection. CC and CT genotypes of TLR4 rs11536889 and rs1927911 respectively, and TC, CC genotypes of TLR9 rs187084, as well as minor alleles of TLR4 rs4986790 and TLR9 rs187084, were associated with the increased risk of cervical cancer. Stage-wise analysis revealed TLR9 rs187084 and rs352140 to be associated with early-stage cancer. TLR4 haplotype GTAC and TLR9 haplotype GATC were associated with the increased risk of cervical cancer while TLR4 haplotype GCAG was associated with the decreased risk. TLR4 haplotype GCAG and TLR9 haplotype GATC showed association with increased susceptibility to hrHPV infection. In conclusion, the present study revealed association of TLR4 and TLR9 polymorphisms and haplotypes with hrHPV infection and cervical cancer risk. Further evaluation of a larger sample size covering diverse ethnic populations globally is warranted.
In this work, we explore the effects of quantum quenching on the circuit complexity of quenched quantum field theory with weakly coupled quartic interactions. We use the invariant operator method ...under a perturbative framework to compute the ground state of this system. We give the analytical expressions for specific reference and target states using the ground state of the system. Using a particular cost functional, we show the analytical computation of circuit complexity for the quenched and interacting field theory. Furthermore, we give a numerical estimate of circuit complexity with respect to the quench rate, δt, for two coupled oscillators. The parametric variation in the unambiguous contribution of the circuit complexity for an arbitrary number of oscillators has been studied with respect to the dimensionless parameter (t/δt). We comment on the variation in the circuit complexity for different values of coupling strength, different numbers of oscillators and even in different dimensions.
Many natural and synthetic flavonoids have been studied and documented by inhibiting aromatase enzymes for their anti-cancer activity against breast carcinoma. The aromatase enzyme is a possible ...target for the estrogen's positive breast cancer receptor.
Hence, a series of flavonoids have been synthesized and assessed for their in vitro cytotoxicity and aromatase inhibitory activity.
39 Flavonoids were synthesized and characterized by spectroscopic techniques, and their computational study was performed using the maestro version of the Schrodinger. In silico ADME properties were checked by QikProp software. A total of 18 compounds were evaluated based on the docking score using cytotoxicity assay in human breast cancer cell line MCF-7.
Of the 18 compounds tested, 07 compounds, namely 2b, 8b, 14b, 15b, 19b, 24b, and 30b flavonoids were found to be more active with their IC50 values of 20.73 μM, 1.636 μM, 16.08 μM, 22.02 μM, 15.75 μM, 0.345 μM and 16.08 μM, respectively, compared with the reference drug letrozole. The in vitro aromatase inhibitory activity of six compounds 2b, 8b, 14b, 19b, 24b, and 30b was conducted using a fluorogenic assay kit. The values of IC50 for compounds 2b and 24b were found to be 0.31 μM and 0.36 μM, respectively.
Therefore, it was concluded that compounds 2b and 24b had a potent inhibitory effect of aromatase compared with letrozole with an IC50 value of 0.86 μM. At the same time, the other compounds 8b, 14b, 30b, and 19b were considered to have similar aromatase inhibitory activity. Hence, their essential aromatase inhibitory activities make them good lead candidates for developing potent inhibitors of aromatase.
Contamination of water by organic chemical pollutants is one of the most critical environmental problems today as these are harmful to human beings and the aquatic ecosystem. Organic chemical ...pollutants persist for a long time in water and cause deleterious effects on human health even in small concentrations. Hence, decontamination of water demands simple methods using efficient materials. Carbon nanotube (CNT) based composites with metal/metal oxide have been materials of significant interest for decontamination of organic chemical pollutants from water due to their catalytic, magnetic, and structural features. Most of the adsorbents/catalysts pass through the challenge of separation from solution, and incorporation of magnetism can make them easily separable in presence of an external magnet. In this review, we present recent progresses and prospects in carbon nanotube based magnetic composites as potential decontaminants. We (i) identify the types of CNT based magnetic composites, (ii) evaluate the magnetism in the composite, (iii) identify different types of organic chemical pollutants in water decontaminated by CNT based magnetic composites, (iv) study the mechanism of removal of pollutants by the composite, (v) assess various parameters such as, nature & composition of CNTs, surface area, pore size & pore volume of the composite, pH of the medium, concentration of the pollutant, nature of the pollutant, temperature and contact time, those affect the efficiency of the composite. A comprehensive analysis on the interaction of organic pollutants and the composite, which play a pivotal role in decontamination of water, has been presented. The removal of organic pollutants like dyes, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, aromatic hydrocarbons and persistent organic pollutants from water has been covered. Overall, this review provides insight for the future efforts on CNT based magnetic composites for the decontamination of organic chemical pollutants in water.
We present Poly-GAN, a novel conditional GAN architecture that is motivated by Fashion Synthesis, an application where garments are automatically placed on images of human models at an arbitrary ...pose. Poly-GAN allows conditioning on multiple inputs and is suitable for many tasks, including image alignment, image stitching and inpainting. Existing fashion synthesis methods have a similar pipeline where three different networks are used to first align garments with the human pose, then perform stitching of the aligned garment and finally refine the results. Poly-GAN is the first instance where a common architecture is used to perform all three tasks. Our novel architecture enforces the conditions at all layers of the encoder and utilizes skip connections from the coarse layers of the encoder to the respective layers of the decoder. Poly-GAN is able to perform a spatial transformation of the garment based on the RGB skeleton of the model at an arbitrary pose. Additionally, Poly-GAN can perform image stitching, regardless of the garment orientation, and inpainting on the garment mask when it contains irregular holes. Our system achieves state-of-the-art quantitative results on Structural Similarity Index metric and Inception Score metric using the DeepFashion dataset.
Motivated by recent studies of circuit complexity in weakly interacting scalar field theory, we explore the computation of circuit complexity in Z2 Even Effective Field Theories (Z2 EEFTs). We ...consider a massive free field theory with higher-order Wilsonian operators such as ϕ4, ϕ6, and ϕ8. To facilitate our computation, we regularize the theory by putting it on a lattice. First, we consider a simple case of two oscillators and later generalize the results to N oscillators. This study was carried out for nearly Gaussian states. In our computation, the reference state is an approximately Gaussian unentangled state, and the corresponding target state, calculated from our theory, is an approximately Gaussian entangled state. We compute the complexity using the geometric approach developed by Nielsen, parameterizing the path-ordered unitary transformation and minimizing the geodesic in the space of unitaries. The contribution of higher-order operators to the circuit complexity in our theory is discussed. We also explore the dependency of complexity on other parameters in our theory for various cases.
Background: Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) plays a key role in the elimination of viral pathogens by recognising their CpG DNA. Polymorphisms in the
TLR9 gene may influence their recognition and ...subsequent elimination. Therefore, the present study was designed to elucidate the role of a rare unexplored
TLR9 gene polymorphism C296T/ Pro99Leu (rs5743844) in cervical cancer susceptibility among Indian women.
Methods: The genotyping of
TLR9 Pro99Leu polymorphism in 110 cervical cancer patients and 141 healthy controls was performed by polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP).
Results: The genotype frequency detected in both cervical cancer and control populations was 1.0 (CC), 0.0 (CT) and 0.0 (TT); while the allele frequency was found to be 1.0 (C) and 0.0 (T).
Conclusions: The present study demonstrates no involvement of
TLR9 C296T/ Pro99Leu polymorphism in cervical cancer susceptibility and supports minor allele frequency (MAF) (0.0002) status of the same as no nucleotide variation was detected in any of the study subjects.
This paper studies the impact of multi-domain dynamics on the memory window (MW) of a Ferroelectric FET (FeFET). The memory window primarily depends on the density of domains in the ferroelectric ...region. We show that a maximum MW is possible if one domain wall is present in the ferroelectric layer. Furthermore, enhancing the ferroelectric layer thickness decreases the gradient energy leading to an expansion in the domain period. This increased domain period reduces the domain density and improves the MW. On the other hand, domain density increases with the increase in dielectric layer thickness, which reduces the MW. Additionally, the nature of the domain wall also alters the MW remarkably, causing a reduction in the MW when the domain wall gradually switches from hard to soft. The optimum range of the device's physical parameters is obtained by minimizing the net ferroelectric thermodynamic energy corresponding to the maximum MW and serves as a device design guideline.