Given the paucity and toxicity of available drugs for leishmaniasis, coupled with the advent of drug resistance, the discovery of new therapies for this neglected tropical disease is recognised as being of the utmost urgency. As such antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been proposed as promising compounds against the causative Leishmania species, insect vector-borne protozoan parasites. Here the AMP temporins A, B and 1Sa have been synthesised and screened for activity against Leishmania mexicana insect stage promastigotes and mammalian stage amastigotes, a significant cause of human cutaneous disease. In contrast to previous studies with other species the activity of these AMPs against L. mexicana amastigotes was low. This suggests that amastigotes from different Leishmania species display varying susceptibility to peptides from the temporin family, perhaps indicating differences in their surface structure, the proposed target of these AMPs. In contrast, insect stage L. mexicana promastigotes were sensitive to two of the screened temporins which clearly demonstrates the importance of screening AMPs against both forms of the parasite. Copyright © 2011 European Peptide Society and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The aim of the current study is to demonstrate the effect of honey on the sperms characteristics (sperm concentration, sperm motility, grade of activity and sperm normal morphology) as well as pregnancy rate in mice. Sperms were obtained from caudal epididymis of male mice and prepared by adding10% of honey to the IVF medium using direct sperms activation technique for 30 minute incubation period before artificial insemination.
The study revealed a significant (P > 0.05) increase in active sperm motility (grade A and grade B) 49% and pregnancy rate 53.3% in female mice artificially inseminated with sperms. On the other hand, there were no significant differences in sperm con
... Show MoreContinuous conflict between Parisian and Ottoman states the results that Iraq became as
aground for their battles which leads to their own interests in Iraq which are shape their
strategy. The conflict continues for long time. In spite of, they signed many treatments and
protocols between the two sides, as Arzarom treaty , the first and the second, Tahran protocols
, and Astana protocol. This conflict, no sides of them to dose any part of their land, but these
treaties leaded to a big loss to Iraq ,which lost parts of it's land and water area in Ahwaz and
shatt AL-Arab, so, Iraq became as a smoth target for their interests, and lost its
sovereignty,and lost self-govern of the country country . so the research conclud
The study consists of video clips of all cars parked in the selected area. The studied camera height is1.5 m, and the video clips are 18video clips. Images are extracted from the video clip to be used for training data for the cascade method. Cascade classification is used to detect license plates after the training step. Viola-jones algorithm was applied to the output of the cascade data for camera height (1.5m). The accuracy was calculated for all data with different weather conditions and local time recoding in two ways. The first used the detection of the car plate based on the video clip, and the accuracy was 100%. The second is using the clipped images stored in the positive file, based on the training file (XML file), where the ac
... Show MoreSoft clays are generally sediments deposited by rivers, seas, or lakes. These soils are fine-grained plastic soils with appreciable clay content and are characterized by high compressibility and low shear strength. To deal with soft soil problems there is more than one method that can be used such as soil replacement, preloading, stone column, sand drains, lime stabilization and Prefabricated Vertical Drains, PVDs. A numerical modeling of PVD with vacuum pressure was analyzed to investigate the effect of this technique on the consolidation behavior of fully and different depths of partially saturated soft soils. Laboratory experiments were also conducted by using a specially-designed large consol
... Show MoreData steganography is a technique used to hide data, secret message, within another data, cover carrier. It is considered as a part of information security. Audio steganography is a type of data steganography, where the secret message is hidden in audio carrier. This paper proposes an efficient audio steganography method that uses LSB technique. The proposed method enhances steganography performance by exploiting all carrier samples and balancing between hiding capacity and distortion ratio. It suggests an adaptive number of hiding bits for each audio sample depending on the secret message size, the cover carrier size, and the signal to noise ratio (SNR). Comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms state of the art methods
... Show MoreIn this paper, we study the incorporation of the commensalism interaction and harvesting on the Lotka–Volterra food chain model. The system provides one commensal prey, one harvested prey, and two predators. A set of preliminary results in local bifurcation analysis around each equilibrium point for the proposed model is discussed, such as saddle-node, transcritical and pitchfork. Some numerical analysis to confirm the accruing of local bifurcation is illustrated. To back up the conclusions of the mathematical study, a numerical simulation of the model is carried out with the help of the MATLAB program. It can be concluded that the system's coexistence can be achieved as long as the harvesting rate on the second prey population is
... Show MoreThe holmium plasma induced by a 1064-nmQ-switched Nd:YAG laser in air was investigated. This work was done theoretically and experimentally. Cowan code was used to get the emission spectra for different transition of the holmium target. In the experimental work, the evolution of the plasma was studied by acquiring spectral images at different laser pulse energies (600,650,700, 750, and 800 mJ). The repetition rates of (1Hz and 10Hz) in the UV region (200-400 nm). The results indicate that, the emission line intensities increase with increasing of the laser pulse energy and repetition rate. The strongest emission spectra appeared when the laser pulse energy is 800mJ and 10 Hz repetition rate at λ= 345.64nm, with the maximum intensi
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