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Amphotericin B has long been regarded as the gold standard for treating invasive fungal infections despite its toxic potential. The main objective of this research was to develop a novel IONPs@CS-AmB formulation in a cost-effective manner in order to enhance AmB delivery performance, with lowering the drug's dose and adverse effects. The chitosan-coated iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs@CS) were synthesized afterward, AmB-loaded IONPs@CS (IONPs@CS-AmB) prepared and characterized by AFM, FT-IR, SEM, EDX, and XRD. Biological activity of the synthesized NPs determined and the cytotoxicity of IONPs@CS-AmB evaluated using the MTT and in vitro hemolysis tests. The IONPs@CS-AmB was synthesized using the coprecipitation method with core-shell structure in size range of 27.70 to ∼70 nm. The FT-IR, XRD and EDX pattern confirmed the successful synthesis of IONPs @CS-AmB. The IONPs@CS-AmB exhibited significant antifungal activity and inhibited the metabolic activity of Candida albicans biofilms. The hemolysis and MTT assays showed that IONPs@CS-AmB is biocompatible with high cell viability when compared to plain AmB and fungizone. The IONPs@CS-AmB is more effective, less toxic and may be a suitable alternative to conventional drug delivery. IONPs@CS-AmB may be a viable candidate for use as a microbial-resistant coating on the surfaces of biomedical devices.

Asafoetida and sagapenum as valuable Iranian oleo-gum-resins from Ferula spp. (F. assa-foetida, F. persica, F. foetida and F. alliacea) have received interest during the history for producing valuable perfumes and common spices or as pharmaceutical agents. The aim of the present work was to characterize sources of asafoetida and sagapenum, according to botanical aspects, traditional and conventional medicine and phytochemical data. Available publications have been gathered from databases up to May 2019, and common Persian literatures were reviewed. We showed that sources for asafoetida and sagapenum should be differentiated botanically according to basal leaves, size of rays, fruits and petals. Furthermore, despite similarities, volatile sulfur components in F. assa-foetida are disulphides, in F. persica tri/tetra/pentasulphides, and in F. alliacea trisulphides. In the case of coumarins, conferol, conferone, farnesiferol A and B, samarcandin and samarcandin acetate are so far reported from F. assa-foetida and F. persica, and asacoumarin A from F. assa-foetida and F. foetida samples; while, persicaosides A-D have been reported only from F. persica. Moreover, farnesiferol C as the major coumarin in F. assa-foetida and mogoltavidin in F. persica would be new pharmacopeia markers. However, coumarins and essential oils similarities and differences among Ferula species should be more studied in a comparative research. Such studies would be essential for determining reliable sources and minimum requirements for standardizations of worldwide valuable wild growing medicinal and economical plants.

The biogenic synthesis of silver nanoparticles has recently attracted more attention to counter microbial resistance, which has been one of the medical concerns in the last decade. This research expresses the biogenic synthesis of silver nanoparticles utilizing Ferula assafoetida aqueous extract (Fer@AgNP) as a reducing and capping agent. The total parts of the plant were extracted from an aqueous solution (FerEX) and characterized using GC/MS apparatus. The Fer@AgNP and chemically synthesized silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) were characterized using UV-vis, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopies, field emission-scanning transmission electron microscopy, powder X-ray diffraction analysis, and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The impacts of nanoparticles and FerEX were evaluated against four pathogenic bacterial strains, including Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhi, and Enterococcus faecalis, using the microdilution method. The biocompatibility of compounds was also evaluated on human cell line L-929 using MTT and human blood cells using the hemolytic assay. The major compounds found in FerEX were sulfur-containing compounds such as butyl disulfides (45.36%) and monoterpenes such as α-pinene (25.66%), β-pinene (16.31%), and ocimene (7.26%). The characterizations of materials confirmed the hexagonal structure of AgNPs. The sizes of cAgNP and Fer@AgNP were about 42.7 nm and 22.5 nm. The antimicrobial activity of Fer@AgNP was considerably developed and reached MIC values ranging from 10 to 50 μg/mL compared to AgNP, which showed MIC values ranging from 50 to 100 μg/mL. The biocompatibility assessment showed that the Fer@AgNP was improved compared to AgNP and had a minimal toxic impact on the normal fibroblast cell line. The Fer@AgNP also indicated outstanding compatibility with human RBCs. The results illustrated that biosynthesized Fer@AgNPs have improved antimicrobial efficacy against Gram-negative and Gram-positive pathogenic bacteria with promising biocompatibility and can be used as potential antibacterial agents.

Undesirable vibrations resulting from the use of vibrating hand-held tools decrease the tool performance and user productivity. In addition, prolonged exposure to the vibration can cause ergonomic injuries known as the hand-arm vibration syndrome (HVAS). Therefore, it is very important to design a vibration suppression mechanism that can isolate or suppress the vibration transmission to the users' hands to protect them from HAVS. While viscoelastic materials in anti-vibration gloves are used as the passive control approach, an active vibration control has shown to be more effective but requires the use of sensors, actuators and controllers. In this paper, the design of a controller for an anti-vibration glove is presented. The aim is to keep the level of vibrations transferred from the tool to the hands within a healthy zone. The paper also describes the formulation of the hand-glove system's mathematical model and the design of a fuzzy parallel distributed compensation (PDC) controller that can cater for different hand masses. The performances of the proposed controller are evaluated through simulations and the results are benchmarked with two other active vibration control techniques-proportional integral derivative (PID) controller and active force controller (AFC). The simulation results show a superior performance of the proposed controller over the benchmark controllers. The designed PDC controller is able to suppress the vibration transferred to the user's hand 93% and 85% better than the PID controller and the AFC, respectively. Published version This work was supported by UTM Research University Grant Vote 04G18 and the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia.

As water-soluble flavonoid derivatives, anthocyanidins and anthocyanins are the plants pigments mostly rich in berries, pomegranate, grapes, and dark color fruits. Many bioactivity properties of these advantageous phytochemicals have been reported; among them, their significant abilities in the suppression of tumor cells are of the promising therapeutic features, which have recently attracted great attention. The prostate malignancy, is considered the 2nd fatal and the most distributed cancer type in men worldwide. The present study was designated to gather the preclinical and clinical studies evaluating potencies of anthocyanidins/anthocyanins for the treatment and prevention of this cancer type for the first time. In general, findings confirm that the anthocyanins (especifically cyanidin-3-O-glucoside) indicated higher activity against prostatic neoplasms compared to their correlated anthocyanidins (e.g., delphinidin); in which potent anti-inflammatory, apoptosis, and anti-proliferative activities were analyzed. Complementary anti-prostate cancer assessment of diverse naturally occurred anthocyanidins/anthocyanins and their synthetically optimized derivatives through preclinical experiments and eventually confirmed by clinical trials can promisingly lead to discover natural-based chemotherapeutic drug options.

Persian or Russian olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia L.), from the family Elaeagnaceae, is a nitrogen-fixing thorny shrub extensively used in traditional medicine to alleviate pain and treat rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, gastrointestinal problems, fever, and asthma. The current review has tried to give a concise overview of the phytochemistry and pharmacological properties of the plant from published data. Accordingly, published English literatures on Elaeagnus angustifolia were gathered from popular databases such as PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect up to 31 December 2015. In accordance with traditional and ethnopharmacological uses, different extracts of E. angustifolia have been known for their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-nociceptive, antimicrobial, muscle relaxant, anti-ulcer and wound-healing capabilities. Additionally, cardioprotective, antitumor and anti-mutagenic effects of the herb have been demonstrated by current assessments. Despite numerous experimental studies, there is a notable lack of profound and comprehensive clinical trials as well as critical research on E. angustifolia toxicity and teratogenicity. With reference to various pharmacological effects based on experimental and animal investigation, it is worthy to mention a frame for respective clinical studies in further studies.

Optimal power flow (OPF) is an important problem in the operation of electric power systems. Due to the OPF problem's non-convexity, there may exist multiple local optima. Certifiably obtaining the global optimum is important for certain applications of OPF problems. Many global optimization techniques compute an optimality gap that compares the achievable objective value corresponding to the feasible point from a local solution algorithm with the objective value bound from a convex relaxation technique. Rather than the traditional practice of completely separating the local solution and convex relaxation computations, this paper proposes a method that exploits information from a local solution to speed the computation of an objective value bound using a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. The improvement in computational tractability comes with the trade-off of reduced tightness for the resulting objective value bound. Numerical experiments illustrate this trade-off, with the proposed method being faster but weaker than the SDP relaxation and slower but tighter than second-order cone programming (SOCP) and quadratic convex (QC) relaxations for many large test cases.

Background: Data from the ethnopharmacological field on the treatment of dysuria are provided and analyzed with regard to traditional healers from Shiraz and in comparison to previous studies. Material and Methods: From April 21 to June 25, 2014, we visited traditional markets called Attari in Shiraz, and plants used in dysuria were collected. Questionnaires asking for general information on the traditional healers named Attars, local names of plant species, plant parts, preparation methods, etc. were prepared in order to gather data from Attars. Results: We visited 40 Attari, and 29 questionnaires were filled in by male Attars. Evaluation of our investigation revealed that Tribulus terrestris, Zea mays, and Cerasus avium were the most common plants suggested by Attars (24, 23, and 23, respectively). Infusion (37%) and decoction (34%) were the most common preparation methods for these plants. 50% of the main effects intended by the Attars were antimicrobial effects, while diuretic effects were reported at 35.7%. The temperament of the plants, as one aspect of the questionnaires, showed that more plants have a hot and dry temperament (47.9%). According to available studies about the plants, we found that flavonoids (78.3%), higher terpenoids (43.5%), and essential oils (39.1%) exist in higher amounts than other components in the plants. Conclusions: We analyzed the information gathered from the questionnaires and from previous studies and found that flavonoids are the most important constituents among the plants, especially those that exist in T. terrestris, Z. mays, and C. avium. Due to the useful effects of flavonoids in urological diseases, we suggest to evaluate and concentrate on the effects of flavonoids in dysuria treatments.

Optimal power flow (OPF) is known as one of the most important planning and scheduling tools in electrical power systems. The OPF problem is a non-convex, NP-hard optimization problem, therefore, the applications of metaheuristic algorithms in the OPF problem have been gained more attentions in recent years. This article investigates successful application of recently developed optimizer, so called, water cycle algorithm (WCA) on the OPF. The WCA, as a metaheuristic optimization method, is inspired by water cycle process in nature. The IEEE 57-bus test system has been taken into account. The obtained optimization results show the better optimal power flow solution using the WCA compared with the other reported optimization approaches. Therefore, the applied WCA can be considered as an alternative approach for tackling OPF.

Online shopping has become an essential part of our life, which provides a suitable, cheap, and quick way for customers to enjoy a wide variety of products. However, due to the large number of online stores, a customer usually faces difficulties to review all available offers manually in order to find a favorite item. The Internet shopping optimization problem (ISOP) is a multiple-item multiple-shop optimization problem, which targets to minimize the total cost for a costumer to purchase a given set of products over all available offers. In this paper, the mathematical model of existing ISOP has been improved. In the improved model of ISOP different constraints and assumptions such as the maximum budget, discounts offered by internet shops have been taken into account. Several metaheuristic optimization methods such as the genetic algorithm are implemented. The obtained numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the improved model and metaheuristics applied.

In this paper an improved Mamdani fuzzy sliding mode controller for a reduced-order averaged model of active clamp converter, which is more accurate than the other existing reduced-order models, is presented. The procedure of designing a fuzzy sliding mode controller for an active clamp single-ended primary inductance converter (SEPIC) is described. The Simulation results confirm the performance and robustness of designed controller against the converter parameters variations.

Intelligent power allocation and load management systems have been playing an increasingly important role in aircrafts whose electrical network systems are getting more and more complex. Load shedding used to be the main means of aircraft power management. But the increasing number of electrical components and the emphasis of safety and human comfort call for more resilient power management. In this paper we present a novel power allocation and scheduling formulation which aims for minimum load shedding and optimal generator operational profiles. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem and solved by CPLEX optimization tool.

The objective of this study is to simulate and analyze the effects of fuzzy logic based tuning of PID controllers for a heating and cooling energy system, while accounting for the dynamics of the major system components. A that a less amount of control signal, interpreted as cooling or heating energy fed into the system, shows the appropriateness of the controller, and the simulation results represent the excellent performance of proposed controller for this purpose.

In this paper, Fuzzy PID and Fuzzy PD+I controller are designed for a nonlinear quarter car suspension system. The main aim of these controllers is to decrease vertical car body displacement and control signal, therefore provides more comfortable conditions for passengers. Simulation results show excellent efficiency of the proposed controller.