Three-dimensional (3D) cell culture systems have gained increasing interest in drug discovery and tissue engineering due to a number of advantages in providing more physiologically relevant information and potentially more predictive data for in vivo tests. Extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins have been developed over in recent years to simulate a natural microenvironment for cells cultured in vitro. Conventional cell culture or 2D cell culture form monolayers of cells on a solid surface, which is typically polystyrene or glass, whereas a 3D culture system employ a porous growth matrix on which the cells grow. The transition from cell culture on a flat surface 2D to a 3D model in vitro is expected to mimic more realistic culture environments. However, the major limitation of 2D culture is their lack of structural architecture and stroma and not all types of normal epithelial cell are able to adhere and grow on 2D culture. For this study, two different immortal cell lines were used (HeLa and HaCaT cells) and two commercial 3D substrates (Collagen Rat Tail and Geltrex) were used, in order to evaluate how the transition from 2D to 3D affects viability, cell cycle, live/dead cell, responses to the drug exposure and bio-spectroscopy studies. The viability of cells were monitored with the aid of the Alamar Blue assay, cellular morphology was monitored with confocal microscopy, cell cycle and cell death studies were performed with flow cytometry and viability of 3D culture in bio-spectroscopy performed with Raman spectroscopy. The viability studies showed apparent differences between the 2D and 3D culture systems, the differences attributed in part to the physical transition from 2D to a 3D environment causing alterations to effective resazurin concentration, uptake and conversion rates. This was verified by flow cytometry, in which no significant differences in viable cell numbers between 2D and 3D systems was ii observed. Cell cycle analysis revealed cellular function could be altered by growth on the 3D substrates and the alterations were noted to be dependent on 3D membrane concentration. The use of 3D culture matrices has been widely interpreted to result in “improved viability levels” or “reduced” toxicity or cellular “resistance” compared to cells cultured on traditional 2D systems. Cells were grown on the different substrates (Collagen and CaF2), confirming that the in vitro cell culture environment impacts significantly on the cell cycle. The live cell in vitro Raman spectroscopic analysis of cells on the 2D CaF2 and 3D Collagen substrates was performed and data were analysed using principal component analysis (PCA). The spectroscopic analysis revealed differences in profiles which reflect the differences in cell cycle for both in vitro culture environments. In particular, the Raman spectra of cells grown on CaF2 show indicators of cell stress, which are also associated with cell cycle arrest at the G0/G1 phase. Doxorubicin still induced apoptosis with no difference in the population levels in 3D and 2D culture of apoptotic, necrotic and live cells. Also, cells grown on both substrates were arrested at G0/G1 phase by the Doxorubicin, Raman spectra collected from cells grown in Collagen showed that, Doxorubicin is clearly seen to be present in the nucleolus, nucleus and cytoplasm of the HaCaT cells. Statistical analysis, consisting of principal components analysis (PCA) was used to highlight the Doxorubicin interaction with HaCaT cells grown in 3D cultures. The results of this study show that Cellular health and viability levels were not altered by culture in 3D environments, but their normal cycle could be altered verified by the cell cycle studies performed and these variations must be accounted for in studies employing 3D membranes. The Raman spectra of cells grown on CaF2 show indicators of cell stress, which are also associated with cell cycle arrest at the G0/G1 phase. The bioavailability or effective concentration of the cytotoxicity assay and the chemotherapeutic agent are both affected by the iii absorptive nature of the matrix. Despite the differences in the cell cycle in cells grown in 2D and 3D cultures, the efficacies and ultimate effect of the drug on all the cultured cells are the same regardless of culture environment and the variations in the cell cycle for cells grown on different substrates must be accounted for in vitro cellular screening in particular when screening cell cycle dependant toxicants. This study has shown that the use of 3D culture systems has the potential to make a significant impact in the Raman spectroscopy field in particular Collagen is a cost effective substrate replacement for more expensive options. 

The basic questions that must be answered during the crime investigation is who left the biological evidence and when. DNA profiling can, in most cases, successfully identify the person who deposited the sample, leaving, therefore, as the main concern question about the length of time between deposition of the stain and its subsequent recovery. The research in the present thesis is concerned with development of the mRNA and miRNA analysis for correct assessment of the age of blood, saliva, and semen samples. It is widely accepted that the level of RNA in the sample decreases over time. Therefore, reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) method was performed to quantity the selected markers and investigate how they degrade as a function of time.

The emergence and evolution of superbugs is among the greatest challenges to public health worldwide

recently. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics considered as one of greatest hits of this century. There are

different antibiotic resistant strains that range for infection from mild to severe cases and tonsillitis

is one among of many bacterial diseases that have high incidence globally. Half of tonsillitis cases are

bacterial and those mainly caused by group-A beta-hemolytic streptococci (GABHS) bacteria which

had developed its resistance against commonly used antibiotics, mainly penicillin and macrolids.

Currently, however, there are considerable attempts to tackle the issue despite they are still far away

from promised settlement. Focusing on testing and evaluating of herbal therapies will be of great value

in finding of potent alternative medicine to face resistant bacterial infections and to provide sufficient

therapeutic agent to disband the problem. Hence the necessity to develop novel therapeutics to replace

conventional antibiotics will likely play a key role to fix the issue. This article concentrate on review of

ineffective antibiotic therapy including some of its impacts and describes possibility to use Saussurea

lappa (S. Lappa) plant as an effective herbal plant to treat resistant bacterial acute tonsillitis cases.

DNA, RNA, and protein are represented as strings in bioinformatics for this reason string processing is the cornerstone in the field of bioinformatics and these problems take a variety of manifestations each of which has a specific meaning. This topic will shed some light on some traditional string problems such as: local sequence alignment problem, global sequence alignment problem, exact pattern matching problem, approximate pattern matching problem, finding all maximal palindromes problem, finding all tandem repeats problem, finding all tandem arrays problem, etc. There are quite rich researches for these problems. This paper, will propose the major algorithms in this respect which implemented in BioQt.

Abstract

Purpose In this literature review, functional outcomes such as Disability of Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) score and the visual analog scale (VAS) of pain along with clinical outcomes such as range of movement and grip strength of treated distal radius fractures (DRF) accompanied with ulnar styloid fractures (USF) will be compared with those with isolated DRF. Materials and Methods We analyzed articles from MEDLINE, Embase, and CINAHL that met our predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria as per the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis statements. This resulted in the identification of 464 articles with 18 potentially eligible studies of which 6 were included at the full-text screening stage. The primary outcomes were wrist pain, range of motion, functional outcome and satisfaction, such as VAS, and the DASH questionnaire along with radiological assessment and incidence of complications. Results These studies involved 796 participants with DRF and 806 wrists with DRF; 444 (55%) of DRF had an associated USF. Three studies did not report any statistically significant difference in DASH scores between the DRF patients with or without USF. Two studies reported worse DASH scores in the group with associated USF. Wrist pain was reported to be statistically significantly worse in patients with associated USF in two studies. Grip strength did not exhibit a statistically significant difference in any groups in four studies. On assessing the range of motion of the wrist and forearm, only one study reported a statistically significant difference in flexion at 2 years follow-up, with less flexion in patients with USF. Conclusion This review suggests that there is no significant correlation between a USF and the functional and clinical outcomes of DRF treatment, albeit wrist pain and less flexion were reported in some studies to be associated with USF. There is a need for more robust evidence from large randomized controlled trials to specifically look at the effects of fixation versus nonfixation of USF on DRF, or large prospective cohort studies assessing DRF with and without USF, with a minimum of 12 months follow-up. Level of Evidence Level II-therapeutic.

The in vitro cell culture environment can impact on cell biochemistry and cell cycle. The manifestation of such substrate-induced changes in cell cycle in the Raman microspectroscopic profiles of cell cultures is investigated at the level of nucleolus, nucleus and cytoplasm. HeLa immortalised human cervical cells and HaCaT dermal cells were cultured on three different substrates, conventional polystyrene cell culture dishes, CaF2 slides as a commonly used Raman substrate, and glass slides coated with Collagen Rat Tail, as a mimic of the extra cellular matrix (ECM) environment. A cell cycle study, based on percentage DNA content, as determined using Propidium Iodide staining and monitored by flow cytometry, was performed on cells of both types, grown on the different substrates, confirming that the in vitro cell culture environment impacts significantly on the cell cycle. Live cell in vitro Raman spectroscopic analysis of cells on the 2D CaF2 and 3D Collagen substrates was performed and data was analysed using principal components analysis (PCA). The spectroscopic analysis revealed differences in profiles which reflect the differences in cell cycle for both in vitro culture environments. In particular, the Raman spectra of cells 2 grown on CaF2 show indicators of cell stress, which are also associated with cell cycle arrest at the G0/G1 phase. This work contributes to the field of Raman spectroscopic analysis by providing a fresh look at the significance of the effect of in vitro culture environment to cell cycle and the sensitivity of Raman spectroscopy to such differences in cell metabolism. 

Study question: What are the overall estimate of the different indicators of infertility in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region? Summary answer: The overall clinical primary and total infertility rate in the MENA region are (3.8%, 95% Cl = 1.7-8.4) and (17.2%, 95% Cl = 10.6-26.7) respectively.

Hadoop has been developed as a platform solution for processing a large scale of data in parallel for different applications in Cloud com-puting. A Hadoop system can be characterized based on three main factors: cluster, workload, and user. Each of these factors can be described in heterogeneous environment, which reflects the heterogeneity degree of the Hadoop system. This paper investigates the effect of heterogeneity in each of these factors on the performance of Hadoop for different schedulers. Three schedulers which consider differ-ent levels of Hadoop heterogeneity are used for the analysis: FIFO, Fair sharing, and COSHH (Classification and Optimization based Scheduler for Heterogeneous Hadoop). Performance issues are introduced for Hadoop schedulers and comparative performance analysis between different cases of jobs submission. These jobs are processed in heterogeneous data environments and, under fixed or reconfigu-rable slot between map and reduce tasks for Hadoop MapReduce java programming clustering model. The results showed that when assigning tunable knob between map and reduce tasks under certain scheduler like FIFO algorithm, the performance enhanced about 81.42% especially in cases of heterogeneity environment where the workload is decreased significantly and the utilization of computa-tional resources in increased obviously.

Hadoop is a Java-based programming framework that supports the storing and processing of large data sets in a distributed computing environment and it is very much appropriate for high volume of data. It uses HDFS for data storing and uses MapReduce for processing that data. MapReduce is a popular programming model to support data-intensive applications using shared-nothing clusters. The main objective of MapReduce programming model is to parallelize the job execution across multiple nodes for execution. Nowadays, all focus of the researchers and companies toward to Hadoop. Due to this, many scheduling algorithms have been proposed in the past decades. There are three important scheduling issues in MapReduce such as locality, synchronization and fairness. The most common objective of scheduling algorithms is to minimize the completion time of a parallel application and also achieve to these issues. Performance issues are introduced for Hadoop schedulers, and comparative performance analysis between different cases of jobs submission. These jobs are processed in different homogenous data environment and, under fixed or reconfigurable slot between map and reduce tasks for Hadoop MapReduce java programming clustering model. The results showed that when assigning tunable knob between map and reduce tasks under certain scheduler like FIFO algorithm, the performance enhanced 16.66% in inverted index, 55.55% in word count and 11.76% in classification process.

Infertility is a worldwide health issue with high impact on the individuals involved and the society as a whole. Estimates of infertility are very important to inform social and economic policies. The aim of this systematic literature review is to estimate the prevalence of primary and secondary infertility in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and produce the overall estimate of the different indicators of infertility in MENA region. A systematic search was conducted to identify publications providing data from MENA countries. All titles and abstracts retrieved using this search strategy were managed by Endnote software, duplicates were removed and studies on animals, systematic reviews, and from non-MENA region was removed from the EndNote library. Seven electronic databases and websites were searched for relevant articles and surveys with no language or date restriction on July 2017. Data of prevalence