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 

Consanguinity constitutes one of the major health problems worldwide,

in which consanguineous marriages are associated with an increased risk for

congenital malformations and autosomal recessive diseases. Although the

advancement in modern biomedicine and forensic laboratories techniques continue

to guide scientists to move forward to unravel many life sciences secrets, it is still

ambiguous to investigate the full picture of milk kinship and its related

consanguinity. Theoretically, it is possible to see such consanguinity developed

from early sufficient breast-milk feeding. Thus, scientists should cooperate to

investigate the problem practically to find a proper solution. This review article

focuses on the alleged consanguinity that evolves from milk breastfeeding or

beyond through wet nursing or milk formula feeding. Additionally, this article

proposes the idea of removing milk genetic components to establish a new safe

genetically free formula as a promising solution.

Bacterial infections are one of the most dangerous infections that threaten the existence and continuity of life.

Despite the discovery and manufacturing of effective antibiotics to tackle these menaces, bacteria have developed

resistance against such treatments and transformed into new mutant resistant strains. Bacteriophages, or phages, are

regarded as effective alternative antibacterial agents. Recently, scientists have been taking a closer look at the variety of

different phages that attack bacteria. This review primarily focuses on the potential of phage therapy as an alternative

treatment to overcome a wide spectrum of resistant bacterial infections, as well as current phage therapy advancement. It

also proposes the idea of engineering “broad-spectrum phage” to overcome a wide range of resistant bacterial infections,

and its advantages over antibiotics, individual phage, and phage cocktails.

In this study, the cellular viability and function of immortalized human cervical and dermal cells are monitored and compared in conventional 2D and two commercial 3D membranes, Collagen and Geltrex, of varying working concentration and volume. Viability was monitored with the aid of the Alamar Blue assay, cellular morphology was monitored with confocal microscopy, and cell cycle studies and cell death mechanism studies were performed with flow cytometry. 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 3D environment causing alterations to effective resazurin concentration, uptake and conversion rates, which was dependent on exposure time, but also due to the effect of the membrane itself on cellular function. These effects were verified by flow cytometry, in which no significant differences in viable cell numbers between 2D and 3D systems were observed after 24 h culture. The results showed the observed effect was different after shorter exposure periods, was also dependent on working concentration of the 3D system and could be mediated by altering the culture vessel size. 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. The results of this study show that cellular health and viability levels are not altered by culture in 3D environments, but their normal cycle can be altered as indicated in the cell cycle studies performed and such variations must be accounted for in studies employing 3D membranes for in vitro cellular screening.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: A thorough knowledge of fetal growth and development is key to understanding both the normal and abnormal fetal MR imaging findings. We investigated the size and signal intensity of the normal pituitary gland and the intrasphenoidal ossification around the Rathke pouch in formalin-fixed fetuses on MR imaging.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Thirty-two fetuses with undamaged brains were included in this study (mean age, 19.93 weeks; age range, 12–31 weeks). Visual inspection of the pituitary and ossification around the Rathke pouch in the sphenoid bone or the postsphenoid ossification was conducted. The extent of pituitary and postsphenoid ossification, pituitary/pons signal ratio, and postsphenoidal ossification/sphenoid bone signal ratio was compared according to gestational age.

RESULTS: The pituitary gland was identified as a hyperintense intrasellar structure in all cases, and postsphenoid ossification was identified as an intrasphenoidal hyperintense area in 27 of the 32 cases (84%). The mean pituitary/pons signal ratio was 1.13 ± 0.18 and correlated weakly with gestational age (R2 = 0.243), while the mean postsphenoid ossification/sphenoid bone signal ratio was 2.14 ± 0.56 and did not show any increase with gestational age (R2 = 0.05). No apparent change in the size of pituitary hyperintensity was seen with gestational age (R2 = 0.001). Postsphenoid ossification showed an increase in size with gestational age (R2 = 0.307).

CONCLUSIONS: The fetal pituitary gland was hyperintense on T1-weighted images and the pituitary/pons ratio and extent of postsphenoid ossification correlated weakly with gestational age.

The interest in the use of 3D matrices for in vitro analysis, with a view to increasing the relevance of in vitro studies and reducing the dependence on in vivo studies, has been growing in recent years. Cells grown in a 3D in vitro matrix environment have been reported to exhibit significantly different properties to those in a conventional 2D culture environment. However, comparison of 2D and 3D cell culture models have recently been noted to result in differing responses of cytotoxic assays, without any associated change in viability. The effect was attributed to differing conversion rates and effective concentrations of the resazurin assay in 2D and 3D environments, rather than differences in cellular metabolism. In this study, the efficacy of a chemotherapeutic agent, doxorubicin, is monitored and compared in conventional 2D and 3D collagen gel exposures of immortalized human cervical cells. Viability was monitored with the aid of the Alamar Blue assay and drug internalisation was verified using confocal microscopy. Drug uptake and retention within the collagen matrix was monitored by absorption 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 dye resazurin uptake and conversion rates. The use of 3D culture matrices has widely been interpreted to result in “reduced” toxicity or cellular “resistance” to the chemotherapeutic agent. The results of this study show that the reduced efficiency of the drug to cells grown in the 3D environment can be accounted for by a sequential reduction of the effective concentration of the test compound and assay. This is due to absorption within the collagen gel inducing a higher uptake of both drug and assay thereby influencing the toxic impact of the drug and conversion rate of resazurin, and. The increased effective surface area of the cell exposed to the drug and assay in the 3D environment. The effect was noted to be higher after shorter exposure periods and should be accounted for in in vitro 2D and 3D culture environment comparisons.