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Affibody molecules are small protein scaffolds mostly based on triple-helical bundle protein domains. Many triple helix-based affibody proteins have shown prominent properties for tumor imaging and therapy. In our opinion, the structural organizations and the sizes of affibody molecules could be modified to increase their recognition abilities and binding affinities to human epidermal growth factor receptor type 2 (HER2). Thereby, the purpose of this study was to design and characterize a novel platform of affibody molecule consisting of five separate helixes (encoding 99 amino acids with a duplicate of helixes 1 and 2 at N-terminus plus GGGC chelator peptide sequence at C-terminus) enable of binding to HER2 with higher avidity. Using in silico screening methods, the structure and the interactive potential of designed affibody was comparatively investigated. The molecular expression and production of the designed affibody in Escherichia coli cells was successfully examined and reported.

The effect of cinnamon and turmeric powders on performance, and blood parameters of broiler chickens under heat stress were investigated. 200 one-day-old male chicks (Ross 308) were used in a completely randomized design with four treatments and five replicates with 10 birds in each replicate. All birds were treated with heat stress (32οC) and were either fed no any supplement (control), or 0.5% turmeric, 0.5% cinnamon, and a blend of cinnamon and turmeric (0.25% each) when they were 25 to 42 days of age. We found that supplementation of turmeric, cinnamon, and their combination increased feed intake and body weight gain compared to control birds (P < 0.05). Blood uric acid concentration and lactate dehydrogenase activities decreased in the supplemented diets ‎ (P < 0.05). Blood malondialdehyde also decreased in all diets, but had the most striking reduction in the diets containing both turmeric and cinnamon (P < 0.05)‎. Blood aspartate aminotransferase, urea, and creatinine were not affected by the dietary treatments. Similarly, blood sodium, potassium, chlorine, hematocrit and rectal temperature were unchanged by the supplements (P > 0.05). In conclusion, dietary supplementation of cinnamon and turmeric either alone or together improve the performance of broiler chickens under heat stress by reducing lipid peroxidation.

Objectives: Premature infants (born before 37 weeks of gestational age) frequently experience feeding difficulties due to underdeveloped oral motor skills and poor chewing, swallowing, and breathing coordination. In order to improve oral feeding efficiency in these infants, Oral-Motor Stimulation (OMS) has been used in various studies. This systematic review study will aim to assess the effectiveness of OMS for oral feeding in preterm infants., Materials & Methods: The authors will follow the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. They will conduct a search in electronic databases, including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials in The Cochrane Library (CENTRAL), Medline via PubMed, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) for nursing and related healthcare texts without language restrictions from the first month of 1991 to the fifth month of 2024 to achieve the study objectives. All Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials (RCT) examining the effect of OMS on oral feeding in preterm infants will be included in this study., Results: The primary outcome of this systematic review will be oral feeding, and the secondary outcomes will include duration of hospitalization, weight gain, and feeding efficiency. Two independent reviewers will select and extract data for the study. The Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool (RoB2) will be used to evaluate potential biases in the study. Publication bias will be evaluated using funnel plots, Begg's, and Egger's tests. The degree of heterogeneity among the studies will be assessed using the I2 statistic and the χ2 test. Analyses of subgroups will also be carried out. All meta-analyses will be conducted using Stata V.14., Conclusion: This systematic review protocol for preterm infants will aim to promote evidence-based decision-making and support the development of clinical practice guidelines in preterm feeding., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (© 2024 The Authors. Published by Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences.)

Hypernasality is a frequently occurring resonance disorder in children with cleft palate. In general, an operation is necessary to reduce the hypernasality and therefore an assessment of hypernasality is imperative to quantify the effect of the surgery and design the speech therapy sessions, which are crucial after surgery. In this paper, a new quantitative method is proposed to estimate hypernasality. The proposed method used the fact that an autoregressive (AR) model for vocal tract system of a patient with hypernasal speech is not accurate; because of the zeros appear in the frequency response of the vocal tract system. Therefore in our method, hypernasality was estimated by a quantity calculated from comparing the distance between the sequences of cepstrum coefficients extracted from AR model and autoregressive moving average model. K-means and Bayes theorem were utilized to classify the utterances of subjects by means of proposed index. We achieved the accuracy up to 81.12% on utterances and 97.14% on subjects. Since the proposed method needs only computer processing of speech data, compared with other clinical methods it provides a simple evaluation of hypernasality.