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The objective of the present study is to develop a lyophilization medium for Streptococcus thermophilus (NCIM 2904) as the industrial exploitation of this bacterium totally depends upon preservation and lyophilization protocols. Protective effect of 18 compounds were observed individually and in combinations with different sugars, sugar alcohols, polymers, protein concentrates and buffers. Among all the protectants tested, ammonium citrate (1% w/w), K2HPO4 (1% w/w) and KH2PO4 (1% w/w) provided lowest protection to these bacterial cells while 10% (w/w) sodium caseinate, whey protein concentrate, sweet whey powder, and skim milk showed significant results in viability escalation. Survival in carbon sources like lactose, sucrose and maltodextrine was also favored maximally. Combination of sodium caseinate 10%, skim milk 5%, sucrose 5%, lactose 5% and mono sodium glutamate 1% in distilled water in ratio of 1:5 with S. thermophilus showed survival percentage of 96%.

Oral cancer is one of the main causes of cancer-related deaths in South-Asian countries. There are very limited treatment options available for oral cancer. Research endeavors focused on discovery and development of novel therapies for oral cancer, is necessary to control the ever rising oral cancer related mortalities. We mined the large pool of compounds from the publicly available compound databases, to identify potential therapeutic compounds for oral cancer. Over 84 million compounds were screened for the possible anti-cancer activity by custom build SVM classifier. The molecular targets of the predicted anti-cancer compounds were mined from reliable sources like experimental bioassays studies associated with the compound, and from protein-compound interaction databases. Therapeutic compounds from DrugBank, and a list of natural anti-cancer compounds derived from literature mining of published studies, were used for building partial least squares regression model. The regression model thus built, was used for the estimation of oral cancer specific weights based on the molecular targets. These weights were used to compute scores for screening the predicted anti-cancer compounds for their potential to treat oral cancer. The list of potential compounds was annotated with corresponding physicochemical properties, cancer specific bioactivity evidences, and literature evidences. In all, 288 compounds with the potential to treat oral cancer were identified in the current study. The majority of the compounds in this list are natural products, which are well-tolerated and have minimal side-effects compared to the synthetic counterparts. Some of the potential therapeutic compounds identified in the current study are resveratrol, nimbolide, lovastatin, bortezomib, vorinostat, berberine, pterostilbene, deguelin, andrographolide, and colchicine.

p24 is an immunodominant gagcore protein of HIV-1. The synthetic immunodominant epitope of p24 and the recombinant p24 show poor immunoreactivity and specificity, respectively. Their application is, therefore, severely limited in the serodiagnosis of HIV-1, although it is an important marker for early diagnosis. These limitations have been overcome by conjugating the synthetic p24 to BSA through a decaalanine peptide spacer. The engineered p24 shows about 5-fold more efficient immunoreactivity than the synthetic p24, and, at the same time, shows a several fold reduction in nonspecific cross-reactivity as compared to recombinant p24. Our strategy to conjugate the p24 peptide epitope to BSA worked well as a consistent and reliable immunodiagnostic marker. This strategy may also prove useful for the diagnosis of other diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, oral cancer has consistently ranked among top three causes of cancer-related deaths, and it has emerged as a top cause for the cancer-related deaths among men. Lack of effective therapeutic options is one of the main challenges in clinical management of oral cancer patients. We interrogated large pool of samples from oral cancer gene expression studies to identify potential therapeutic targets that are involved in multiple cancer hallmark events. Therapeutic strategies directed towards such targets can be expected to effectively control cancer cells. Datasets from different gene expression studies were integrated by removing batch-effects and was used for downstream analyses, including differential expression analysis. Dependency network analysis was done to identify genes that undergo marked topological changes in oral cancer samples when compared with control samples. Causal reasoning analysis was carried out to identify significant hypotheses, which can explain gene expression profiles observed in oral cancer samples. Text-mining based approach was used to detect cancer hallmarks associated with genes significantly expressed in oral cancer. In all, 2365 genes were detected to be differentially expressed genes, which includes some of the highly differentially expressed genes like matrix metalloproteinases (MMP-1/3/10/13), chemokine (C-X-C motif) ligands (IL8, CXCL-10/-11), PTHLH, SERPINE1, NELL2, S100A7A, MAL, CRNN, TGM3, CLCA4, keratins (KRT-3/4/13/76/78), SERPINB11 and serine peptidase inhibitors (SPINK-5/7). XIST, TCEAL2, NRAS and FGFR2 are some of the important genes detected by dependency and causal network analysis. Literature mining analysis annotated 1014 genes, out of which 841 genes were statistically significantly annotated. The integration of output of various analyses, resulted in the list of potential therapeutic targets for oral cancer, which included targets such as ADM, TP53, EGFR, LYN, CTLA4, SKIL, CTGF and CD70.