Background: Enterococcus faecalis is a causative agent for urinary tract infections (UTIs) in Iraq and worldwide, even though it is a commensal bacterium in human and animal intestines. It can cause different illnesses due to its ability to produce various virulence factors. A pore-forming toxin (cytolysin) is the most virulence factor in this bacterium. Objective: This study aims to molecularly investigate the frequency of cytolysin toxin among E. faecalis isolated from UTIs. Methods: A hundred and eighty urine specimens were collected from females diagnosed with UTIs. Traditional laboratory and molecular methods were used for bacterial identification and toxin detection using a modified DNA extraction method. Results: The findings revealed that 27.7% (50\180) of causative agents in UTIs were E. faecalis based on the molecular technique that targeted a housekeeping gene (ddI) with specific primers using polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Most of the isolates harboured the cytolysin toxin gene (cylLL) with a frequency rate of 92% (46\50). Conclusions: A considerable prevalence of cytolysin-positive isolates in UTIs, which is a worrying indicates of the extensive spreading of a toxic strain in UTIs. The modified method for DNA extraction in gene detection was successfully used to amplify a housekeeping gene (ddI) and a virulence gene (cylLL) for cytolysin toxin detection, and this approach can be utilised for rapid bacterial identification and gene detection in medical and research purposes with a large sample size in an inexpensive manner within a short time.
Alginate is one of the natural biopolymers that is widely used for drug formulations, combination of alginate with other polymers, such as gum acacia, pectin, and carrageenan can increase mechanical strength, therefore, can reduce leakage of the encapsulated active pharmaceutical ingredient from the polymer matrix. Interaction of alginate and these polymers can occur via intermolecular hydrogen bonds causing synergism, which is determined from the viscosity of polymer mixture.
Alginate was combined with gum acacia/pectin/carrageenan in different blending ratios (100:0, 75:25, 50:50, 25:75, and 0:100) with and without addition of CaCl2. The synergism effect is obtained from the design of experimental (DoE), and calculati
... Show MoreOily carwash wastewater is a high organic and chemical wastewater. This paper targeted to investigate a treatment to decrease the water consumption and contaminants in car-washing stations. Electrocoagulation combined with ultrasonic energy (Sono-Electrocoagulation) was suggested so that the carwash wastewater is treated to be reused. The effect of both the voltage and time of treatment on the removal of COD, turbidity, conductivity, and total dissolved solids (TDS) were studied at constant initial pH 7 and electrode distance 2 cm. The results showed the best results of removal COD, turbidity, TDS, and reduce electrical conductivity is when the voltage was 30 V and a treatment time of 90 minutes.
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... Show MoreIn this article, the additivity of higher multiplicative mappings, i.e., Jordan mappings, on generalized matrix algebras are studied. Also, the definition of Jordan higher triple product homomorphism is introduced and its additivity on generalized matrix algebras is studied.
The objective of the study was to predict crop coefficient (K) values for cucumber inside the greenhouse during the growing season 2014, using watermarks gypsum blocks and atmometer c apparatus during the growing stages and to compare the predicted values of the crop coefficient with different methods and approaches. The study was conducted in the greenhouses field within Al-Mahawil Township, 70 km south of Baghdad, Iraq. The watermarks soil water sensors and atmometer apparatus were used to measure crop evapotranspiration and reference evapotranspiration on daily basis, respectively. The comparison and the statistical analysis between the calculated K in this study and values obtained from greenhouse gave a good agreement. The root mean
... Show MorePolymer additives binder system provides many properties useful in thermal energy storage (TES) then developed the efficient energy storage materials and green strength bodies system.
This paper studies the thermal energy storage property for polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH) / paraffin wax (WPw) blends. To enhance paraffin wax thermal conductivity, PVOH as a material which high conductivity was employed. A fixed weight of Paraffin wax was dispersed with PVOH heterogeneously at different additive weights ratios of PVOH/Pw (50/50, 67/33, 75/25, and 80/20) wt. ratio respectively. The composite material was prepared using wetted pressing method.
Both base materials (polyvinyl alcohol and paraffin wax) were scanned using differential
... Show MoreProject management are still depending on manual exchange of information based on paper documents. Where design drawings drafting by computer-aided design (CAD), but the data needed by project management software can not be extracted directly from CAD, and must be manually entered by the user. The process of calculation and collection of information from drawings and enter in the project management software needs effort and time with the possibility of errors in the transfer and enter of information. This research presents an integrated computer system for building projects where the extraction and import quantities, through the interpretation of AutoCAD drawing with MS Access database of unit costs and productivities for the pricing and
... Show MoreAn investigation was conducted for the study of extraction of metal ions using aqueous biphasic systems. The extraction of iron, zinc and copper from aqueous sulphate media at different kinds of extractants SCN− , Cl- and I- , different values of pH of the feed solution, phase ratio, concentration of metals, concentration of extractant, concentration of polymer, and concentration of salt was investigated. Atomic absorption spectrophotometer was used to measure the concentration of iron, zinc and copper in the aqueous phase throughout the experiments. The results of the extraction experiments showed the use of SCN− as extractant, pH=2.5, phase ratio=1.5, concentration of metals 1g/l, concentration of extractant 0.06 %, concentration o
... Show MoreFacial emotion recognition finds many real applications in the daily life like human robot interaction, eLearning, healthcare, customer services etc. The task of facial emotion recognition is not easy due to the difficulty in determining the effective feature set that can recognize the emotion conveyed within the facial expression accurately. Graph mining techniques are exploited in this paper to solve facial emotion recognition problem. After determining positions of facial landmarks in face region, twelve different graphs are constructed using four facial components to serve as a source for sub-graphs mining stage using gSpan algorithm. In each group, the discriminative set of sub-graphs are selected and fed to Deep Belief Network (DBN) f
... Show MoreIt has become necessary to change from a traditional system to an automated system in production processes, because it has high advantages. The most important of them is improving and increasing production. But there is still a need to improve and develop the work of these systems.
The objective of this work is to study time reduction by combining multiple sequences of operations into one process. To carry out this work, the pneumatic system is designed to decrease\ increase the time of the sequence that performs a pick and place process through optimizing the sequences based on the obstacle dimensions. Three axes are represented using pneumatic cylinders that move according to the sequence used. The system is implemented and con
... Show MoreThe work involves synthesis of a new homologous series of hydrogen bonding
liquid crystal dimers containing chalcone moiety. All the prepared compounds were
characterized by spectroscopic techniques such as FT – IR, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR as
well as elemental analysis. All the synthesized dimers exhibited nematic and smectic
A phase. The mesophases behaviour and transitional temperatures were studied by
polarized microscopy and differential scanning calorimetry, and are discussed the
self- assemble of H-bonding donor and acceptor complexes