Antibacterial effects of natural tenderizing enzymes on different strains of Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Listeria monocytogenes on beef

This study determined the efficacy of actinidin and papain on reducing Listeria monocytogenes and three mixed strains of Escherichia coli O157:H7 populations on beef. The average reduction of E. coli O157:H7 was greater than that of L. monocytogenes and higher concentrations of either protease yielded greater reduction in bacterial populations. For instance, actinidin at 700 mg/ml significantly (p ≤ 0.05) reduced the population of L. monocytogenes by 1.49 log cfu/ml meat rinse after 3 h at 25 & 35 °C, and by 1.45 log cfu/ml rinse after 24 h at 5 °C, while the same actinidin concentration significantly reduced the populations of three mixed strains of E. coli O157:H7 by 1.81 log cfu/ml rinse after 3 h at 25 & 35 °C, and 1.94 log cfu/ml rinse after 24 h at 5 °C. These findings suggest that, in addition to improving the sensory attributes of beef, proteolytic enzymes can enhance meat safety when stored at suitable temperatures.     

A comparison of the space requirements of multi-dimensional quadtree-based file structures

A comparison is made of the space requirements of pointer and a number of pointer-less implementations of multidimensional quadtree-based file structures. The database is assumed to be static. In order to make the comparison realistic, considerations such as computer byte sizes are taken into account, and fields are constrained to start on bit and byte boundaries where appropriate. In many practical cases, the pointer quadtree requires less space than the pointer-less quadtree. This effect is more pronounced for octrees and data of higher dimension. Empirical data from a cartographic batabase are used to support the analysis.The support of the National Science Foundation under Grant IRI8802457 is gratefully acknowledged     

High Performance Liquid Chromatographic Analysis and Dissolution of Ampicillin and Cloxacillin in Capsule Formulation

A reversed phase high performance liquid chromatographic method was developed for the quantitation of ampicillin and cloxacillin in capsule using a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile (45.3%) in phosphate buffer. Sample preparation before analysis was minimal. The method is precise and adaptable for quality control purposes. The use of the analytical method for studying capsule dissolution is described.     

Inter Vehicle Distance Based Connectivity Aware Routing in Vehicular Adhoc Networks

Connectivity in vehicular traffic environment has witnessed significant attention due to the direct impact on the performance of most of the traffic safety applications of intelligent transport system. Various parameters such as density, speed, direction, link quality and inter vehicle distance (IVD) have been utilized for measuring connectivity. IVD has greater impact on connectivity and controls the impact of other parameters. Usage of real time IVD for measuring connectivity has not received sufficient attention in VANETs. This paper proposes IVD based connectivity aware routing (Ivd-CAR) for enhancing connectivity aware data dissemination. IVD calculation is robust and can effectively handle instantaneous GPS failure. Two localization techniques; namely, cooperative localization and Geometry based Localization are developed. Standard deviation of real time IVDs of a forwarding path is derived. Distribution of IVDs of a forwarding path is employed for estimating connectivity. Segment vehicle based next hop vehicle selection is utilized for incorporating network load, link quality and direction into consideration while selecting forwarding path. Simulations are carried out in ns2 to evaluate the performance of Ivd-CAR in realistic traffic environment. Comparative analysis of simulation results attests the superiority of Ivd-CAR to the state-of-the-art techniques: CSR and A-CAR.     

ConcaveCubes: Supporting Cluster‐based Geographical Visualization in Large Data Scale

In this paper we study the problem of supporting effective and scalable visualization for the rapidly increasing volumes of urban data. From an extensive literature study, we find that the existing solutions suffer from at least one of the drawbacks below: (i) loss of interesting structures/outliers due to sampling; (ii) supporting heatmaps only, which provides limited information; and (iii) no notion of real‐world geography semantics (e.g., country, state, city) is captured in the visualization result as well as the underlying index. Therefore, we propose ConcaveCubes, a cluster‐based data cube to support interactive visualization of large‐scale multidimensional urban data. Specifically, we devise an appropriate visualization abstraction and visualization design based on clusters. We propose a novel concave hull construction method to support boundary based cluster map visualization, where real‐world geographical semantics are preserved without any information loss. Instead of calculating the clusters on demand, ConcaveCubes (re)utilizes existing calculation and visualization results to efficiently support different kinds of user interactions. We conduct extensive experiments using real‐world datasets and show the efficiency and effectiveness of ConcaveCubes by comparing with the state‐of‐the‐art cube‐based solutions.     

Efficient Data Reporting in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Recently, intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) have emerged. These systems can improve traditional transportation systems and provide traffic information to travelers. In the area of transportation, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can replace the existing wired sensors and expensive traffic monitoring systems to mitigate the time and costs of installing such systems. However, accurate and on-time traffic information delivery is a major challenge, considering the energy constraints of sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose a two-tier architecture that includes a network of mobile objects (vehicles) in the upper layer and a hierarchical WSN in the bottom layer. Using this approach, a portion of loads on the low-power static sensor nodes can be transferred to mobile objects, such as powerful mobile devices. Moreover, to provide accurate and timely traffic information, a QoS-aware link cost function has been proposed and used for data transmission between the static sensor nodes. In addition, due to the mobility of the objects and the probability of losing packets in the mobile object tier, a reliable data forwarding mechanism has been proposed for this tier. In this mechanism, data packets are forwarded to the neighbors, which enhance the probability of the packets’ being received. The performance evaluation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and data reporting mechanism for use in ITS applications.     

Dynamic Prediction based Multi Queue (DPMQ) drop policy for probabilistic routing protocols of delay tolerant network

Two most important issues should be considered to achieve data delivery in DTN networking: routing protocols for the network and intelligent buffer management policy for everyone node in the network. The routing scheme decides which messages should be forwarded when nodes meet, and the buffer management policy determines which message is purged when the buffer overflows in a node. This study proposes a buffer management policy named as Dynamic Prediction based Multi Queue (DPMQ) for probabilistic routing protocols. It works by classification of local buffer into three queues of messages, which are DCTL, HPTL and LPTL. The simulation results have proven that the DPMQ performs well as compared to DLA, DOA, MOFO, LIFO, LEPR and LIFO in terms of reducing the message relay, message drop, hop counts average and overhead while rising in the delivery probability.     

Characterization of the primo vascular system in rabbit vagina

The primo vascular system (PVS) is observed in different parts of the body under different physiological and disease conditions. Previously, the PVS was not observed in the vagina. The vaginal samples of this study were collected from the female genitalia of healthy New Zealand white rabbits from the animal house, Faculty of Medicine, Assiut University. The vaginal samples were fixed in Bouin's solution. The sections were stained with hematoxylin and eosin and Crossmon's trichrome. Additionally, the sections were immunohistochemically stained with neuron-specific enolase (NSE) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). A primo node was observed on the lymph vessel of the vagina and has several characteristics that resemble those of the previously discovered primo nodes. The primo node in this study was surrounded by mesothelial cells that provide positive immunoreactivity to NSE and VEGF. Sinuses of different sizes, floating cells, telocyte-like cell, and primo microcells were observed as the main constituents of the primo node. Additionally, migratory cells were detected, which passed from the primo node to the enclosing lymph vessel.     

New Approach for Tetrachlorosilane Promoted One-Pot,Condensation Reaction for Tetrahydrobenzo[a]Xanthene-11-Ones with Docking Validation as Aurora Kinase Inhibitor

An efficient synthesis is reported for tetrahydrobenzo[a]xanthene-11-ones through a one-pot catalytic reaction by mixing β-naphthol, demidone and aromatic aldehydes in the presence of a catalytic amount of tetrachlorosilane (TCS) in methylene chloride as solvent at ambient temperature compared with other catalysts derived from silicon. Aurora kinase inhibitors have attracted a great deal of interest as a new class of antimitotic agents and so the molecular docking study was carried out on the synthesized compounds compared with pentacyclic AKI-001 to discover a novel class of Aurora inhibitors based on a tetracyclic xanthene scaffold and understand the orientation and the interaction of each molecule inside the active site of the Aurora A enzyme.