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Byline: S. Lakshmana Pandian, J. Devakumar, T.V. Geetha Semantic information extraction is a process of extracting concepts, entities, relations and entailment rules from a document. We propose an approach to extract concepts, entities and relations from the domain specific Tamil textual documents corpus. Concepts are extracted out by identifying semantic relationship between unique terms in documents by lexical database namely WordNet. Entity extraction process identifies proper names and its predefined named entity categories. Relation between two entities or between two concepts or between concept and entity in each sentence are extracted. This extracted semantic knowledge is exploited as a resource for extracting semantic information from the domain-related documents.

Objective: The objective of this study was to screen the phytochemical compounds, antibacterial activity, and mycelial growth inhibition of three different medicinal plants, namely Couroupita guianensis, Morinda tinctoria, and Tabernaemontana divaricata. Materials and Methods: The antibacterial activity of methanolic leaf extracts was determined by well diffusion method. Antifungal activity was determined by seeded agar technique and its phytochemical screening was also performed. Results: Among three plants, C. guianensis methanolic leaf extract shows better antibacterial activity. In mycelial growth inhibition, all three plants possess complete mycelial growth inhibition against some tested fungi, but C. guianensis leaf extract possesses better inhibition against all tested fungi. Conclusion: Among three different plants, C. guianensis methanolic leaf extract exhibited better antimicrobial activity and this may be due to the presence of phenolic compounds, tannin, and terpenoids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The unexplored region of Western Ghats possesses natural source of noble therapeutic floras for many diseases. The present study was aimed to investigate the in vivo antiplasmodial activity of Syzygium jambos from Western Ghats. Methods: The four extracts acetone, chloroform, methanol and aqueous were explore their antiplasmodial activity by Peter's four day test. Results: In Peter's four day test significant parasite suppression 99.24% (P<0.001) was observed in Chloroquine (CQ 25mg/kg b.wg.) group prolonging the mean survival time of animals ⩾30 days, whereas no average parasitaemia suppression (44.33±0.94) was observed in the negative control group. An effective parasite suppression (P<0.01) of 72.93% and 72.18% was identified in methanol and acetone extracts respectively at 600 mg/kg b.wt. The acetone and methanol extracts prolonged the mean survival days of mice groups up to 27.8 ± 0.68 and 26.0 ± 1.29 days respectively. Conclusion: Among the four extracts tested methanol and acetone extracts exhibited antimalarial activity. The present study report establishes, Syzygium jambos leaf extracts were effective with an assorted range of antiplasmodial activity and could be a potential source in the discovery of antimalarial drug. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Banana is one of the valuable sources for maintaining human health. The use of fresh banana peel extracts for antimicrobial properties can be of great significance in therapeutic treatments. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the antibacterial activity of both fresh and dried various banana peel extracts. Materials and Methods: Alcoholic extract of banana peel extracts was subjected to antibacterial efficacy against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria by the well agar diffusion method. Results: The alcoholic extract of fresh and dried banana peel showed a various inhibitory effect against various microbial isolates. Highest inhibitory effects were observed on Nendran and Poovan against Staphylococcus aureus (13.55 ± 0.04), Bacillus subtilis (13.26 ± 0.02), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (14.5 ± 0.00). Conclusion: Alcoholic peel extracts of fresh and dried banana could be considered as a good antibacterial agent against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dextran is a highly biocompatible molecule with osmotic activity. We synthesized histidine derivatives of dextran, DexH (dextran histidine), to test the feasibility of an IMAC-based controlled release system. DexH was synthesized by the periodate oxidation method. The effect of periodate oxidation and histidine conjugation on osmotic activity was tested. The oxidized intermediate itself exhibited higher osmotic activity than native dextran. Conjugation with histidine further increased the osmotic activity, and the resulting DexH exhibited nine times more osmotic activity than native dextran. A positive correlation was observed between the extent of derivatization with histidine and osmotic activity. Association of DexH was tested on two of the matrices, namely, Cu-IDA-Novarose and Zn-IDA-Novarose. DexH bound to both these matrices, and only partial elution was achieved with stepwise lowering of pH, and complete elution was possible only with EDTA. Interestingly, it was found that DexH in its bound state (DexH-Cu-IDA-Novarose and DexH-Zn-IDA-Novarose) exhibited lesser osmotic activity than the eluted soluble form. The IDA-Cu and IDA-Zn-based solid supports bound strongly to DexH in a species-dependent manner, as the IDA-Zn matrix selectively bound DexH with clustered histidine. Further, this DexH with clustered histidine shows higher osmotic activity. A controlled release system is proposed on the basis of this difference in the osmotic activity between the bound and eluted forms of DexH with EDTA as the external trigger to induce this transition in osmotic activity.

Several natural language processing tools, both commercial and freely available, are used to extract protein interactions from publications. Methods used by these tools include pattern matching to dynamic programming with individual recall and precision rates. A methodical survey of these tools, keeping in mind the minimum interaction information a researcher would need, in comparison to manual analysis has not been carried out. We compared data generated using some of the selected NLP tools with manually curated protein interaction data (PathArt and IMaps) to comparatively determine the recall and precision rate. The rates were found to be lower than the published scores when a normalized definition for interaction is considered. Each data point captured wrongly or not picked up by the tool was analyzed. Our evaluation brings forth critical failures of NLP tools and provides pointers for the development of an ideal NLP tool.

A desired application for microarrays in the clinic is to predict treatment response from an often diverse patient population. We present a method for analyzing microarray data that is predicated on biological pathway and function knowledge as opposed to a purely data-driven initial analysis. From an analysis perspective, this methodology takes advantage of information that is available across genes on a single array, as well as differences in those patterns across measurements. By using biological knowledge in the initial analysis, the accuracy and robustness of microarray profile classification is enhanced, especially when low numbers of samples are available. For clinical studies, particularly Phase I or I/II studies, this technique is exceptionally advantageous.