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A prevalent neurodegenerative condition known as Parkinson's disease (PD) is characterized by a movement disorder with bradykinesia, rest tremor, rigidity, and postural instability. The majority of contemporary PD treatments are predicated on restoring dopaminergic tone in the striatum; however, there are few effective choices available. These, however, do not change the course of the disease and do not address the dopamine-independent symptoms of PD, such as freezing gait, cognitive impairment, and other non-motor aspects of the condition, which frequently have the biggest effects on quality of life. Novel therapy approaches are developing as our understanding of Parkinson's disease pathophysiology increases. These include therapies that target PD symptoms while avoiding the unfavorable side effects associated with currently available therapies, as well as therapies that halt pathology, minimize neuronal loss, and moderate disease progression. This article discusses some promising approaches that are currently being researched in the laboratories or are in the clinical trial phase such as cell based therapies, gene therapy, neuronal therapy, infusion therapy, neuron regeneration and novel drug approaches, which can pose as the future for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease

More than 66 million people in India speak Telugu, a language that dates back thousands of years and is widely spoken in South India. There has not been much progress reported on the advancement of Telugu text Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. Telugu characters can be composed of many symbols joined together. OCR is the process of turning a document image into a text-editable one that may be used in other applications. It saves a great deal of time and effort by not having to start from scratch each time. There are hundreds of thousands of different combinations of modifiers and consonants when writing compound letters. Symbols joined to one another form a compound character. Since there are so many output classes in Telugu, there’s a lot of interclass variation. Additionally, there are not any Telugu OCR systems that take use of recent breakthroughs in deep learning, which prompted us to create our own. When used in conjunction with a word processor, an OCR system has a significant impact on real-world applications. In a Telugu OCR system, we offer two ways to improve symbol or glyph segmentation. When it comes to Telugu OCR, the ability to recognise that Telugu text is crucial. In a picture, connected components are collections of identical pixels that are connected to one another by either 4- or 8-pixel connectivity. These connected components are known as glyphs in Telugu. In the proposed research, an efficient deep learning model with Interrelated Tagging Prototype with Segmentation for Telugu Text Recognition (ITP-STTR) is introduced. The proposed model is compared with the existing model and the results exhibit that the proposed model’s performance in text recognition is high.

The selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx with NH3 over Cu-exchanged chabazite (CHA) zeolites at low temperatures (

We have investigated the synthesis of hexane-1,2,5,6-tetrol (hereafter “tetrol”) from aqueous solutions of biomass-derived levoglucosanol (hereafter “Lgol”) using a (10 wt %)Pt-(10 wt %)WOx/TiO2 ca...

Surgeries are a crucial medical intervention that has saved countless lives from time immemorial. To reduce pain during surgeries patients are administered with anesthetic drugs, which cause loss of sensation and thus reduce the pain involved. However, anesthetists control the effects of the drug by depending on pharmacokinetic calculations, which may vary from patient to patient, thus leading to a reduction in the quality of anesthetic care and adverse effects. To avoid these adverse effects, it is highly necessary to implement a real time monitoring of plasma drug concentration, which will adjust the drug infusion and maintain the levels of drug within therapeutic levels. To implement such a system, it is highly essential to analyze current advances in electrochemical sensor systems for different types of anesthetic drugs like opioids, intravenous anesthetics, and neuromuscular blockers. This review focuses on the present strategy of electrochemical sensors implemented for the detection of anesthetic drugs and it helps towards developing a real time drug dispensing system with respect to the plasma concentration of the drug. This analysis will contribute towards establishing highly effective real time drug dispensing systems like the total intravenous anesthesia technique and patient-controlled analgesia. Such systems will lead to better usage of anesthetic drugs and improve the quality of anesthetic care thus making surgeries safer and more painless.

This research aimed to determine the effect of the dietary treatments and age on the fattening process in cattle. Thirty-six Ongole crossbred cattles were allotted into two different dietary treatments and three different age groups, with six replications for 24 weeks period, 4 weeks of preliminary followed by 20 weeks of data collection at the Beef Cattle Research Station (BCRS). The experimental design was completely randomized with a 2 x 3 factorial. The cattle were placed in individual pens and had ad-libitum access to water and feed, the feeds were elephant grass and concentrate (25:75). The parameters observed were liveweight, DM intake, feed conversion ratio, feed efficiency, IOFC, and BCR. Liveweight was measured every fortnight and feed intakes were measured daily. The results showed that a 10% substitution of DGGS with cassava did not affect all parameters observed. Age did not affect the total gain. Total DM intake increased with age, although percentage of DM intake on liveweight and efficiency decreased with the increasing age. All parameters observed for 18 months old group were better than those in 30- and 42-months old groups. It was concluded that the fattening process at 18 months old PO cattle was the most profitable. Keywords: Ongole crossbred, cattle, intake, FCR, age

This research was conducted at the Nutrition and Animal Feed Laboratory, Beef Cattle Research Institute, Grati, Pasuruan, East Java. This study aimed to determine the effect of the addition of MSG by-product on the durability and nutritional content of the concentrate. The material used in this research was concentrate, which contained several raw materials and was added with MSG by-product with several levels. The treatments applied were: Treatment A: 5 Kg Concentrate (C) + 12% MSG by product (OP); Treatment B: C + 16% OP; Treatment C: C + 20% OP; and Treatment D: C + 24% OP. Observations on variables were carried out for 4 weeks, and the data obtained were analyzed descriptively. The results showed that until the fourth week of storage, there were no differences in flavor, clumpiness, louse, and fungus in treatments A, B, C, and D. In the color of the concentrate, it was known that treatment D had a brownish color but was the darkest when compared to the other treatments and the dust produced by treatment A appears to have the highest dust. However, it was found that the total acid content in treatment D has the highest total acid content, as a result of adding the highest OP concentration and resulting in the highest total acid formation when fermentation occurs during the feed shelf life. Based on these data, it can be concluded that adding OP to the concentrate could maintain its durability and quality until the fourth week of storage in the feed warehouse.

Catalysis science is founded on understanding the structure, number, and reactivity of active sites. Kinetic models that consider active sites to be static and noninteracting entities are routinely successful in describing the behavior of heterogeneous catalysts. Yet, active site ensembles often restructure in response to their external environment and even during steady-state catalytic turnover, sometimes requiring non-mean-field kinetic treatments to describe distance-dependent interactions among sites. Such behavior is being recognized more frequently in modern catalysis research, with the advent of experimental methods to quantify turnover rates with increasing precision, an expanding arsenal of operando characterization tools, and computational descriptions of atomic structure and motion at chemical potentials and timescales increasingly relevant to reaction conditions. This review focuses on dynamic changes to metal active site ensembles on zeolite supports, which are silica-based crystalline materials substituted with Al that generate binding sites for isolated and low-nuclearity metal site ensembles. Metal sites can become solvated and mobilized during reaction, facilitating interactions among sites that change their nuclearity and function. Such intersite communication can be regulated by the zeolite support, resulting in non-single-site and potentially non-mean-field kinetic behavior arising from mechanisms of catalytic action that combine elements of those canonically associated with homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis.We discuss recent literature examples that document dynamic active site behavior in metal-zeolites and outline methodologies to identify and interpret such behavior. We conclude with our outlook on future research directions to develop this evolving branch of catalysis science and harness it for practical applications.

Solvent molecules play important mechanistic roles in catalytic reactions, such as the formation of molecular channels and networks to enable communication between spatially isolated active sites. In this issue of Chem Catalysis, Resasco and colleagues discuss how molecular water delocalizes proton sites from acidic functional groups grafted on a mesoporous silica support, thus facilitating dual-site elementary steps that lead to increased turnover rates of cyclopentanone condensation.

Summary Introduction Patient information leaflet contains specific information regarding the medical conditions, medications as well as the lifestyle modifications required to be followed by the patients. The information collected for the leaflet should be in the simplest form possible so that it can be easily interpreted by the targeted population. Objective The present study aims to develop and validate patient information leaflet for cancer patients. Materials and methods The information for the leaflet was gathered from various primary, secondary and tertiary resources. The content of the leaflet was validated by 10 members including general physicians, medical oncologists, academic pharmacists and clinical pharmacists. Readability of the patient information leaflets was assessed using Flesch Reading Ease test, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test and user readability method. User opinion on the content, layout and design was also obtained from the enrolled patients. Results and discussion The FRE and FK-GL scores of English version of patient information leaflet were 61.2 and 7.9 respectively. The overall user readability score of English, Kannada and Malayalam versions of PIL improved significantly from a pre-test score of 41.80 ± 23.18 to a post-test score of 70.40 ± 23.03. Ninety percent of the total patients enrolled in the study recorded good opinion about the leaflet in terms of its content, layout and design. Conclusion Patient information leaflet based education had a significant impact in improving the knowledge level of cancer patients.

A molecular understanding of the conversion of biorenewable threo- and erythro-levoglucosanol (LGOL) to 3,4-dideoxysugars in aqueous medium is provided based on first-principles simulations. The synthetic importance of this transformation is that these intermediates can be quantitatively hydrogenated to (S,S)/(S,R) hexane-1,2,5,6-tetrol (tetrol), whose stereochemistry depends on which dideoxy sugar intermediates are formed during LGOL conversion. The thermodynamic and kinetic feasibility of the acetal (R₂C(OR)₂) hydrolysis in LGOL is investigated via computing the free energy profile. In aqueous medium, the rate-determining step of LGOL hydrolysis is the protonation of the anhydro-bridge oxygen atom of LGOL concurrent with ring opening, yielding the cyclic forms of 3,4-dideoxymannose (DDM) and 3,4-dideoxyglucose (DDG) from threo- and erythro-LGOL, respectively. The measured activation energies of LGOL hydrolysis are 20.5 and 23.6 kcal/mol for DDM and DDG formation, respectively. These values are in agreement with the computed protonation free energies of 17.1 and 18.2 kcal/mol, respectively. Based on the simulations, a Bronsted base-catalyzed isomerization from DDG or DDM to 3,4-dideoxy fructose (DDF) is preferred with lower apparent activation free energy barriers compared to the acid-catalyzed isomerization. In summary, this study provides mechanistic information about the conversion of the biomass-derived anhydro-sugar LGOL to 3,4-dideoxy sugars, which are precursors to renewable high-value chemicals.

At low temperatures (

Nanoscale coatings of AlOx were deposited onto SiO2 using atomic layer deposition (ALD) to synthesize amorphous silica-alumina (SiAl) catalysts, and these catalysts were investigated for levoglucosanol (Lgol) hydrogenolysis. With decreasing Al2O3 loading, the ratio of Bronsted to Lewis acid sites, measured by NH3-TPD and pyridine-FTIR, systematically increases, while the Al coordination, measured by solid state 27Al NMR, decreases. These structural changes correspond to an increasing mass-normalized rate of Lgol hydrogenolysis. We model the mass-normalized reaction rate as the sum of independent contributions from Bronsted and Lewis sites, showing that Bronsted acid sites on ALD-AlOx/SiO2 catalysts have a 6-times higher turnover frequency (TOF) than Lewis acid sites on these catalysts. Additionally, Lewis acid sites on ALD-AlOx/SiO2 catalysts (potentially related to Al(V) species) have a 4-times higher TOF than Lewis acid sites on bulk γ-Al2O3. The overall mass-normalized reactivity of ALD-AlOx/SiO2 catalysts is due to Lewis acid sites at the highest Al2O3 loading, while it is predominantly due to Bronsted acid sites at the lowest Al2O3 loadings. This work provides a new approach to synthesize amorphous SiAls with tunable Bronsted/Lewis acid site ratio and reveals differences in the reactivity of Bronsted and Lewis acid sites on these materials.

Studies on the clinical profile of urothelial bladder cancer (UBC) have shown significant gender differences, namely, higher occurrence in males (male-to-female ratio of 3.5:1) and an advanced stage of disease at the time of diagnosis with rapid progression of the disease after initial diagnosis seen more commonly in females. The relationship between gender and UBC is complex and probably influenced by biological and epidemiological factors. Potential contributory factors such as sex steroid hormone pathway, gender difference in environmental carcinogen exposure, metabolic enzyme activity, and disparities in the intensity of diagnostic evaluation could probably explain the demographic trends in UBC. This comprehensive review of Medline publications during the period 2009-2019 attempts to identify the possible role of sex hormone receptors in gender variation and sexual dimorphism in the occurrence and progression of UBC. The clinical implications of identifying sex steroid receptors on factors such as disease prognostication and the therapeutic role of anti-androgens in the prevention and progression of UBC are critically reviewed. There is now significant evidence in literature to suggest the possible role of sex steroid hormone receptor-mediated signals in the genesis and progression of UBC. These receptors include androgen receptors, estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and various other orphan receptors. Excessive or reduced expression of these receptors, as well as alterations in their upstream or downstream pathways, correlate well with the clinical and therapeutic outcomes of UBC.

NOx selective catalytic reduction (SCR) with NH3 on Cu-zeolites is a commercial emissions control technology for diesel and lean-burn engines. Mitigating low-temperature emissions remains an outsta...

A series of novel 5-(1,2,3-triazolylmethylsulfanyl)tetrazole derivatives were synthesized by the click reaction from 1-phenyl-5-(prop-2-yn-1-ylsulfanyl)-1H-tetrazole and the corresponding azide. The reaction optimization results showed that higher yields are obtained using CuSO4 and sodium ascorbate in DMF–water (2:1). The product structures were established on the basis of various spectral data, and their evaluation for antimicrobial activity showed moderate to good results compared to standard drugs.