SERine Protease INhibitor clade A member 3 (SERPINA3), a member of the SERine-Protease INhibitor (SERPIN) superfamily, principally works as a protease inhibitor in maintaining cellular homeostasis. ...It is a matricellular acute-phase glycoprotein that appears to be the sole nuclear-binding secretory serpin. Several studies have emerged in recent years demonstrating its link to cancer and disease biology. SERPINA3 seems to have cancer- and compartment-specific biological functions, acting either as a tumour promoter or suppressor in different cancers. However, the localization, mechanism of action and the effectors of SERPINA3 in physiological and pathological scenarios remain obscure. Our review aims to consolidate the current evidence of SERPINA3 in various cancers, highlighting its association with the cancer hallmarks and ratifying its status as an emerging cancer biomarker. The elucidation of SERPINA3-mediated cancer progression and its targeting might shed light on the realm of cancer therapeutics.
Chitin and chitosan are biopolymers having immense structural possibilities for chemical and mechanical modifications to generate novel properties, functions and applications especially in biomedical ...area. Chitin and chitosan are effective materials for biomedical applications because of their biocompatibility, biodegradability and non-toxicity, apart from their antimicrobial activity and low immunogenicity, which clearly points to an immense potential for future development. These candidate biopolymers can be easily processed into gels, sponges, membranes, beads and scaffolds forms. This review emphasizes recent research on different aspects of chitin and chitosan based nanomaterials, including the preparation and applications of chitin and chitosan based nanofibers, nanoparticles and nanocomposite scaffolds for tissue engineering, wound dressing, drug delivery and cancer diagnosis.
Introduction Increased physical activity and functional ability are the goals of total knee replacement surgery. Therefore, adequate rehabilitation is required for the recovery of patients after ...discharge from hospital following total knee arthroplasty (TKA). This systematic literature review aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of home telerehabilitation in patients who underwent TKA. Methods Studies published in the English language between 2000 and 2014 were retrieved from Embase, PubMed, and Cochrane databases using relevant search strategies. Two researchers independently reviewed the studies as per the Cochrane methodology for systematic literature review. We considered telerehabilitation sessions as those that were conducted by experienced physiotherapists, using videoconferencing to patients' homes via an internet connection. The outcomes assessed included: knee movement (knee extension and flexion); quadriceps muscle strength; functional assessment (the timed up-and-go test); and assessment of pain, stiffness, and functional capacity using the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index and visual analogue scale for pain. Results In total, 160 potentially relevant studies were screened. Following the screening of studies as abstracts and full-text publications, six primary publications (four randomized controlled trials, one non-randomized controlled trial, and one single-arm trial) were included in the review. Patients experienced high levels of satisfaction with the use of telerehabilitation alone. There was no significant difference in change in active knee extension and flexion in the home telerehabilitation group as compared to the control group (mean difference (MD) -0.52, 95% CI -1.39 to 0.35, p = 0.24 and MD 1.14, 95% CI -0.61 to 2.89, p = 0.20, respectively). The patients in the home telerehabilitation group showed improvement in physical activity and functional status similar to patients in the conventional therapy group. Discussion The evidence from this systematic literature review demonstrated that telerehabilitation is a practical alternative to conventional face-to-face rehabilitation therapy in patients who underwent TKA.
Wound dressing is one of the most promising medical applications for chitin and chitosan. The adhesive nature of chitin and chitosan, together with their antifungal and bactericidal character, and ...their permeability to oxygen, is a very important property associated with the treatment of wounds and burns. Different derivatives of chitin and chitosan have been prepared for this purpose in the form of hydrogels, fibers, membranes, scaffolds and sponges. The purpose of this review is to take a closer look on the wound dressing applications of biomaterials based on chitin, chitosan and their derivatives in various forms in detail.
Corona virus disease-2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic caused by novel coronavirus. COVID-19 is spreading rapidly throughout the world. The gold standard for diagnosing COVID-19 is reverse ...transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. However, the facility for RT-PCR test is limited, which causes early diagnosis of the disease difficult. Easily available modalities like X-ray can be used to detect specific symptoms associated with COVID-19. Pre-trained convolutional neural networks are widely used for computer-aided detection of diseases from smaller datasets. This paper investigates the effectiveness of multi-CNN, a combination of several pre-trained CNNs, for the automated detection of COVID-19 from X-ray images. The method uses a combination of features extracted from multi-CNN with correlation based feature selection (CFS) technique and Bayesnet classifier for the prediction of COVID-19. The method was tested using two public datasets and achieved promising results on both the datasets. In the first dataset consisting of 453 COVID-19 images and 497 non-COVID images, the method achieved an AUC of 0.963 and an accuracy of 91.16%. In the second dataset consisting of 71 COVID-19 images and 7 non-COVID images, the method achieved an AUC of 0.911 and an accuracy of 97.44%. The experiments performed in this study proved the effectiveness of pre-trained multi-CNN over single CNN in the detection of COVID-19.
In this study, the effect of high residual lignin (21 % w/w) on the thermal properties of cellulose nanofibrils and the performance of films made from these nanofibrils in aqueous environments have ...been explored for the first time. Individualised cellulose nanofibrils with diameter <100 nm were obtained from the mechanical fibrillation of bark residue fibers with high lignin content. The mass loss by thermal degradation started at a higher temperature of 306 °C for these nanofibrils compared to 278 °C for those fibrils with low amount of lignin (5 % w/w). The maximum rate of degradation occurred at a temperature of around 390 and 319 °C for high and low lignin containing nanofibrils, respectively. Such a high thermal stability for high lignin containing nanofibrils has never been reported for nanocellulose from any other studies. The films made from these high lignin nanofibrils showed lower water uptake and better wet mechanical properties compared to films made from low lignin containing cellulose nanofibrils. The high lignin nanofibril films retained 38 % of the dry strength properties, while the low lignin nanofibril films were able to retain only 9 % of dry strength.
Chitin and its deacetylated derivative, chitosan, are non-toxic, antibacterial, biodegradable and biocompatible biopolymers. Due to these properties, they are widely used for biomedical applications ...such as tissue engineering scaffolds, drug delivery, wound dressings, separation membranes and antibacterial coatings, stent coatings, and sensors. In the recent years, electrospinning has been found to be a novel technique to produce chitin and chitosan nanofibers. These nanofibers find novel applications in biomedical fields due to their high surface area and porosity. This article reviews the recent reports on the preparation, properties and biomedical applications of chitin and chitosan based nanofibers in detail.
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is designed to deliver a video communication with better quality at reduced bit rate. For intra coding, HEVC employs an effective hierarchical quad tree ...partitioning and an exhaustive optimal mode search which increases the time complexity. Aiming this issue, we propose a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based method to effectively predict the intra mode. Compared to the standard HEVC encoder HM-15.0, the proposed method could reduce 57.6% of encoding time at a bit-rate penalty of 3.3% at an average PSNR decline of only around 0.09 dB.
•Cellulose nanocrystals exploited as active material for adsorption in porous electrospun fibers.•Superior mechanical properties and negative surface zeta potentials for porous membranes.•Porous ...electrospun-electrosprayed nanocomposites showed optimal adsorption of dyes.
Porous and non-porous cellulose acetate (CA) – cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) electrospun nanocomposite fibers and electrosprayed-electrospun composite membranes were fabricated using two different binary solvent systems. To evaluate the expression of CNC as the active entity in the membrane, dye adsorption studies were carried out using Victoria Blue. To overcome the low surface area of thick porous fibers, a porous electrosprayed-electrospun composite has developed which exhibited 98% dye removal compared to non-porous counterparts (67.9%). The porous membrane with CNC showed an increase of 38mV in surface zeta potential compared to 9mV increases in the case of the nonporous membrane and after the dye adsorption, it maintained the negative charge, indicating that further adsorption is feasible. Moreover, the mechanical properties of porous fibers were found to be ten-fold better than that of nonporous fibers. Creating porous CA-CNC composites is demonstrated as a tool for ensuring better exposure of active materials during the adsorption reaction.
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants has raised concerns about altered sensitivity to antibody-mediated immunity. The relative resistance of SARS-CoV-2 variants B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 to antibody ...neutralization has been recently investigated. We report that another emergent variant from Brazil, P.1, is not only refractory to multiple neutralizing monoclonal antibodies but also more resistant to neutralization by convalescent plasma and vaccinee sera. The magnitude of resistance is greater for monoclonal antibodies than vaccinee sera and evident with both pseudovirus and authentic P.1 virus. The cryoelectron microscopy structure of a soluble prefusion-stabilized spike reveals that the P.1 trimer adopts exclusively a conformation in which one of the receptor-binding domains is in the “up” position, which is known to facilitate binding to entry receptor ACE2. The functional impact of P.1 mutations thus appears to arise from local changes instead of global conformational alterations. The P.1 variant threatens current antibody therapies but less so protective vaccine efficacy.
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•P.1 is refractory to multiple neutralizing mAbs, including three out of the four with EUA•P.1 is relatively resistant to neutralization by convalescent plasma and vaccinee sera•Cryo-EM structure of P.1 spike trimer reveals exclusively one-RBD-up conformation
Wang et al. report that an emergent SARS-CoV-2 variant, P.1, is relatively resistant to neutralization by multiple therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma, and vaccinee sera. The cryoelectron microscopy structure reveals the P.1 trimer to adopt exclusively a conformation with one of the receptor-binding domains in the “up” position.
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