Volatilization of mercury by immobilized mercury-resistant bacterial cells

Highly toxic mercury compounds may come into the environment through the use of mercury compounds as disinfectants for hospital and household purposes, Hg catalyst in industries, burning of coal and petroleum products, mercury-based pesticides and fungicides used in agriculture, and seed dressings. Toxic effects of mercury can be counteracted by microbial cells through the enzymes mercuric reductase and organomercurial lyase. Immobilized mercury-resistant bacterial cells of Azotobacter chroococcum could effectively volatilize mercury from mercury-containing buffer and detoxify mercury compounds. Moreover, the efficiency of mercury volatilization was much greater than with the native cells, as immobilized cells can be reused. Immobilized cells continuously volatilized mercury from mercury-containing buffer after four consecutive 24 h cycles. The storage stability of immobilized cells was much better than that of the native cells.     

2,4-Diaminopyrimidine MK2 inhibitors. Part I: Observation of an unexpected inhibitor binding mode

MK2 is a Ser/Thr kinase of significant interest as an anti-inflammatory drug discovery target. Here we describe the development of in vitro tools for the identification and characterization of MK2 inhibitors, including validation of inhibitor interactions with the crystallography construct and determination of the unique binding mode of 2,4-diaminopyrimidine inhibitors in the MK2 active site. Use of these tools in the optimization of a potent and selective inhibitor lead series is described in the accompanying Letter.     

SAC and Berberine Mediated Repression of Reactive Species and Hepatoprotection After DEN + CCl<Subscript>4</Subscript> Exposure

Oxidative stress is proposed to play a pivotal role in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma. With an accelerated metabolism cancer cells demand high reactive species accumulation to maintain their indiscriminate cell growth and proliferation. Here we wanted to see the status of reactive species in the chemically induced liver cancer. For this purpose swiss albino mice were exposed to DEN and CCl₄ to develop an in vivo model of hepatocarcinoma. Depletion of cellular antioxidants regulated accretion of reactive species during the development of DEN + CCl₄ induced tumor formation in hepatocytes. Currently available therapeutics for heptatocellular carcinoma is costly and coupled with certain bystander effects to the surrounding control cells. Therefore considering the antioxidant properties of SAC and berberine we treated DEN + CCl₄ exposed mice after the development of liver tumor. Results effectively pointed out the usefulness of the alternative treatment with SAC and berberine in hepatoprotection. Replenishment of both enzymatic and non enzymatic antioxidant efficiently reduced accumulation of reactive species and that eventually closely associated with effective reduction in tumor number and size after drug treatment in DEN + CCl₄ exposed mice.     

L<Subscript>2</Subscript>-norm multiple kernel learning and its application to biomedical data fusion

Background  

This paper introduces the notion of optimizing different norms in the dual problem of support vector machines with multiple kernels. The selection of norms yields different extensions of multiple kernel learning (MKL) such as L _∞, L ₁, and L ₂ MKL. In particular, L ₂ MKL is a novel method that leads to non-sparse optimal kernel coefficients, which is different from the sparse kernel coefficients optimized by the existing L _∞ MKL method. In real biomedical applications, L ₂ MKL may have more advantages over sparse integration method for thoroughly combining complementary information in heterogeneous data sources.