Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a disease caused by Leishmania tropica parasite. Current treatments for this parasite are undesirable because of their toxicity, resistance, and high cost. Macrophages are key players against pathogens. Nitric oxide (NO), a molecule produce by immune cells, controls intracellular killing of pathogens during infection. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) demonstrated broad-spectrum activity against various types of infectious diseases. It has the ability to stimulate oxygen species production. This study aims to analyze the macrophages activation through NO production and estimate the cytotoxicity based on the lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release upon exposure to L. tropica and Ag NPs. Serially concentrations of Ag NPs were used under two conditions during and following macrophages exposure to L. tropica. MTT assay was used to determine the cytotoxicity of Ag NPs on L. tropica amastigotes during infection of macrophages in vitro. The results showed that by increasing the Ag NPs concentrations, the viability percentage of L. tropica amastigotes decreased and reached to 21.7 ± 0.64 % during infection compared with the control. The 50% inhibitory concentration of Ag NPs on amastigotes was 2.048µg/ml during infection. Moreover, post-phagocytosis study involved the assessment of NO and LDH release by macrophages upon exposure to L. tropica. It have shown that untreated macrophages released low levels of NO while in the presence of Ag NPs, macrophages were activated to produce higher levels of NO under all experimental conditions. On the other hand, macrophages were capable of controlling cytotoxicity and decreasing LDH levels during phagocytosis of L. tropica amastiogotes. Taking together, these findings suggest that Ag NPs can enhance macrophages NO production which provides a method for the identification of Ag NPs ligands with microbicidal and anti-cytotoxic properties against L. tropica pathogens.
In this work, results from an optical technique (laser speckle technique) for measuring surface roughness was done by using statistical properties of speckle pattern from the point of view of computer image texture analysis. Four calibration relationships were used to cover wide range of measurement with the same laser speckle technique. The first one is based on intensity contrast of the speckle, the second is based on analysis of speckle binary image, the third is on size of speckle pattern spot, and the latest one is based on characterization of the energy feature of the gray level co-occurrence matrices for the speckle pattern. By these calibration relationships surface roughness of an object surface can be evaluated within the
... Show MoreOne of the troublesome duties in chemical industrial units is determining the instantaneous drop size distribution, which is created between two immiscible liquids within such units. In this work a complete system for measuring instantaneous droplet size is constructed. It consists of laser detection system (1mW He-Ne laser), drop generation system (turbine mixer unit), and microphotography system. Two immiscible liquids, water and kerosene were mixed together with different low volume fractions (0.0025, 0.02) of kerosene (as a dispersed phase) in water (as a continuous phase). The experiments were carried out at different rotational speed (1180- 2090 r.p.m) of the turbine mixer. The Sauter mean diameter of the drops was determined by la
... Show MoreIn this work, satellite images classification for Al Chabaish marshes and the area surrounding district in (Dhi Qar) province for years 1990,2000 and 2015 using two software programming (MATLAB 7.11 and ERDAS imagine 2014) is presented. Proposed supervised classification method (Modified Vector Quantization) using MATLAB software and supervised classification method (Maximum likelihood Classifier) using ERDAS imagine have been used, in order to get most accurate results and compare these methods. The changes that taken place in year 2000 comparing with 1990 and in year 2015 comparing with 2000 are calculated. The results from classification indicated that water and vegetation are decreased, while barren land, alluvial soil and shallow water
... Show MoreA number of compression schemes were put forward to achieve high compression factors with high image quality at a low computational time. In this paper, a combined transform coding scheme is proposed which is based on discrete wavelet (DWT) and discrete cosine (DCT) transforms with an added new enhancement method, which is the sliding run length encoding (SRLE) technique, to further improve compression. The advantages of the wavelet and the discrete cosine transforms were utilized to encode the image. This first step involves transforming the color components of the image from RGB to YUV planes to acquire the advantage of the existing spectral correlation and consequently gaining more compression. DWT is then applied to the Y, U and V col
... Show MoreA low-cost, RGB LED-based visible-light spectrophotometer was designed to measure dyes concentration. Dyes are widely used as indicators or coloring agents in different applications and knowing their concentration is an essential part for many studies. The proposed spectrophotometer provides many functionalities that clones the traditional expensive spectrophotometers for a budged price under $50. It was aimed to provide a versatile tool for instructors and educators to teach their students the fundamental concepts behind spectrophotometry. Malachite green, methyl red, and methyl orange dyes were chosen to be good samples to show the integrity of the proposed spectrophotometer in terms of accuracy, repeatability, and sensitivity as
... Show MoreAA Abbass, HL Hussein, WA Shukur, J Kaabi, R Tornai, Webology, 2022 Individual’s eye recognition is an important issue in applications such as security systems, credit card control and guilty identification. Using video images cause to destroy the limitation of fixed images and to be able to receive users’ image under any condition as well as doing the eye recognition. There are some challenges in these systems; changes of individual gestures, changes of light, face coverage, low quality of video images and changes of personal characteristics in each frame. There is a need for two phases in order to do the eye recognition using images; revelation and eye recognition which will use in the security systems to identify the persons. The mai
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