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Background: The CXCR4 receptor along with CXCL12 is believed to have an effect on the onset, progression, migration, and treatment complications and improve acute myeloid leukemia (AML) treatment outcomes. In this study, we investigated the impact of (7+3) chemotherapy protocol on the expression of CXCR4 and its related ligand CXCL12. Method: In this case-control study, specimens were collected before and after the first cycle of chemotherapy of AML-M4 and AML-M5 patients. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and flow cytometry techniques tested the CXCR4 expression. ELISA was used for measuring the serum level of CXCL12. Two samples, t-test and paired t-test, were utilized for data analysis. Results: We found that CXCR4 expression by lymphocyte cells after chemotherapy was approximately similar to the CXCR4 expression in the healthy subjects. Moreover, CXCR4 expression was high prior to chemotherapy. The serum level of CXCL12 considerably increased in the patients before chemotherapy. However, after chemotherapy, CXCL12 was found to reach the baseline level in comparison to the healthy control group. Conclusion: The (7+3) current chemotherapy inhibited CXCL12. Therefore, controlling chemokines along with chemotherapy in AML patients might be conducive to the treatment process or even prevent the relapse of the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wordnet development is an active research area among NLP researchers. Since the manual construction of the English wordnet was very costly both in terms of time and human expertise, automatic approaches have become very popular for wordnet development in languages other than English. Automatic methods usually benefit from an existing wordnet of a high resource language and use it as the backbone of their work. In this article, we present an unsupervised approach for automatic wordnet construction using a combination of Expectation–Maximization and personalized PageRank algorithms. Our method uses some typical and available language resources, so it is applicable to many languages including under-resourced ones. The proposed method needs just a bilingual dictionary and a monolingual corpus for developing a wordnet. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we apply it to the Persian language which is identified as an under-resourced language in NLP tasks. Evaluation results properly indicate the power of the proposed method to construct a high quality and large-scale wordnet for poor-resource languages. According to experiments, we achieve a precision of higher than 93% with a recall of 50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: It has been indicated that pregnant women and neonates are susceptible to COVID‐19 infection. Nevertheless, the unresolved question is about the possibility of COVID‐19 infection in neonates born to COVID‐19 mothers. The present study aimed to assess the routes through which neonates may be infected with the virus: vertically or nosocomially. Case report: This study reports the case of a neonate with COVID-19 infection who became symptomatic 30 h after birth. His pharyngeal swab specimen was reported as positive by real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). It happened while the newborn’s mother was tested for the COVID-19 twice, and she received negative results both times. Conclusion: According to the incubation period of COVID‐19 which is at least 1 day, the possibility of nosocomial transmission is less than other cases reported so far. Moreover, the mother had no COVID-19 symptoms during the last month of delivery. Further clinical research is necessary to determine the routes of maternal transmission of COVID-19 to neonates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To investigate hepatotoxicity in Iranian patients with HIV to assess the association between virologic response to HIV treatment and serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT). Methods This study was conducted with 200 control patients, 75 patients with HIV naïve to antiretroviral therapy (ART), and 443 patients who received ARTs with virologic response (≤1000 copies/mL) or virologic treatment failure (>1000 copies/mL). Serum ALT level and HIV viral load were determined in all patients. Results Patient ALT levels were significantly higher than those of control patients (45.1 ± 44.4 IU/L vs 23.8 ± 5.4 IU/L). Compared to patients who were ART-naïve, patients with ART experience had significantly higher ALT levels (38.2 ± 26.2 IU/L vs 46.3 ± 46.7 IU/L), and severe hepatotoxicity was only detected in those with ART experience (8 patients, 1.8%). Mean ALT had no significant difference between virologic response/failure groups. The ALT activity and HIV load had a negative correlation coefficient, but it was not significant. Conclusion Periodic monitoring for the possibility of hepatotoxicity is highly recommended in all patients with HIV, especially in those receiving ART treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a continuing need to prevent the increasing use of common antibiotic and find the replacement to combat the drug/antibiotic resistant bacteria such as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) such as thanatin peptide. In this study, recombinant thanatin peptide was expressed in the HEK293 cell line. Then the antimicrobial properties of this peptide on some poultry and farm animal's pathogen strains were assessed. The thermal-stability of thanatin was predicted in various temperatures through in silico analysis. Afterwards, according to Minimum Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) results, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were chosen to test the hypothesis of LptA/LptD–thanatin interaction, computationally. Relative amino acid sequences and crystallography structures were retrieved and missed tertiary structures were predicted. The interaction of thanatin with LptA and LptD of Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were analyzed subsequently. The antibacterial activity of thanatin peptide was evaluated between 6.25 and 100 μg/mL using minimum inhibitory concentration. Also, the amounts of minimum bactericidal concentrations (MBC) were between 12.5 and 200 μg/mL. The bioinformatics analysis followed by the in vitro assessment, demonstrated that thanatin would be thermally stable in the body temperature of poultry and farm animals. Thanatin could penetrate to the outer membrane domain of LptD in Escherichia coli and it could block the transition path of this protein while the entrance of LptD in Pseudomonas aeruginosa was blocked for thanatin by extra residues in comparison with Escherichia coli LptD. In addition, the quality of interaction, with regard to the number and distance of interactions which leads to higher binding energy for thanatin and LptD of Escherichia coli was much better than Pseudomonas aeruginosa. But the site and quality of interaction for thanatin and LptA was almost the same for Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Accordingly, thanatin can prevent the assembly of LptA periplasmic bridge in both pathogens. The antibacterial and thermal stability of the thanatin peptide suggested that thanatin peptide might serve as a natural alternative instead of common antibiotics in the veterinary medicine. The outcome of this in silico study supports the MIC results. Therefore, a probable reason for different level of activity of thanatin against Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa might be the quality of LptA/LptD–thanatin interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is an important causative agent of acute and chronic hepatitis. The non-structural protein 3 (NS3) of HCV retains two enzymatic domains which are essential for the virus life cycle. The serine protease inhibitors have developed to improve the responses of HCV-infected patients that have an effective impact on NS3. Nonetheless, drug-resistant variants are the prominent obstruction toward therapeutic success. Sixty-eight Iranian patients infected with HCV genotypes 1a and 3a and diagnosed with chronic active hepatitis were examined. Plasma viral RNA was used to amplify and sequence the HCV NS3 gene; also, HCV viral load, molecular genotyping, and the ALT test were determined for all samples. The sequencing results were used to be analyzed by several reliable bioinformatics tools to determine the physicochemical properties, B cell epitopes, post-modification changes and secondary/tertiary structures; and evaluate the interactions with four drugs. Our results showed that 45% of patients were 1a genotype, the rest of them belonged to 3a genotype, and 70% of patients had abnormal ALT and AST levels. Several substitutions were observed in codons I52M, S102A, L132I, and S166A in 3a genotype and 40, 153 and 91 in 1a genotype. Interactions between references and sample sequences with available drugs showed that different genotypes or common mutations could not have any striking effect on the energy value of the interaction. This study displayed resistance mutations and genetic polymorphisms of NS3 region that are crucial in determining the efficiency of protease inhibitor class of drugs in Iranian HCV infected patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The stimulator of interferon genes (STING) agonist (cGAMP) kills the cancer cells through the activation of the innate immune system. PC3 cells are high in BTK and low in STING. In this study, the effect of adding STING agonist, cGAMP, to docetaxel investigated. Materials and Methods: PC3 cells were treated with docetaxel, cGAMP, and a combination of the docetaxel and cGAMP. Cell toxicity was evaluated by MTT assay, and changes of STING, IRF3, BTK, and DDX41 genes' expression were quantified by the real-time PCR. STING protein was also detected by Western blotting. Results: The IC50 of docetaxel was 31.1 nM, and cGAMP did not change it significantly but decreased docetaxel toxicity about 30%. Docetaxel increased IRF3, BTK, and DDX41 gene expression significantly, and STING protein about 5 folds. By adding cGAMP to docetaxel STING, IRF3, and BTK, expression decreased several folds. Conclusion: In this in vitro study, cGAMP potentiated docetaxel's effects and alleviated it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducction. The present study was conducted to evaluate the related factors to health-improvement lifestyle and value of health among middle aged women. Material and Methods: The present study was a descriptivecorrelational research that was conducted with participation of 278 middle aged women who referred to the health centers of Isfahan and were selected randomly in 2016. Data were collected using demographic characteristics questionnaire, Walker's Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLPII) and a researcher-made questionnaire for the value of health that were completed by the participants. Data were analyzed using SPSS software with Pearson correlation coefficient test, linear regression analysis, Mann-Whitney test and Wilcoxon test. Results: According to the results of the present study there was a direct relation between the score of value of health and the total score of lifestyle and the scores all of its domains (p < 0.05). There was a significant relation between the employment of middle aged women and the domains of personal relationships and spiritual growth lifestyle and also between background diseases and physical stress and stress management of the healthimprovement lifestyle (p < 0.05). Also a significant relation was observed between the age of the middle aged women and the value of health and the domain of responsibility of the heath-improvement lifestyle (p < 0.05). Conclusions: To enhance the level of the health-improvement and value of health lifestyles among this group of women it is necessary to pay attention to matters such as support, facilitation and personal-social factors in the healthcare programs for these women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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