The effect of essential oil of Achillea wilhelmsii flowers on cisplatin-induced hepatotoxicity

Background: The essential oil of Achillea wilhelmsii has‎ anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Cisplatin is one of the most important anticancer drugs that are widely used to treat various types of cancers. This study aimed at examining the effects of the essential oil of A. wilhelmsii flowers on cisplatin-induced hepatotoxicity in rats. Materials and Methods: In this study, 36 male Wistar rats weighing 200-250 g were divided into 6 groups: 1) control, 2) cisplatin (0.4 mg/kg), 3) cisplatin and essential oil (30 mg/kg), 4) cisplatin and essential oil (60 mg/kg), 5) essential oil (30 mg/kg) and 6) essential oil (60 mg/kg).The injection was performed in the groups every day for 8 weeks. Then, serum levels of liver enzymes were measured and the liver tissue was removed for histopathological studies. Results: The results showed no significant changes in the albumin level (P>0.05). However, the activities of hepatic factors ALT, AST, ALP and bilirubin were decreased significantly in the groups received essential oil 30 and 60 mg/kg + cisplatin and in groups only received the essential oil 30 and 60 mg/kg compared to the cisplatin group (P<0.05). Histopathological analysis of liver showed a significant difference in all groups compared to the control group, which this difference in the group received essential oil 60 mg/kg + cisplatin was higher than other groups. Conclusion: The essential oil of A. wilhelmsii decreases serum levels of liver factors and bilirubin against cisplatin

A Discrete Version of the Inverse Scattering Problem and the J-matrix Method

The problem of the Hamiltonian matrix in the oscillator and Laguerre basis construction from the S-matrix is treated in the context of the algebraic analogue of the Marchenko method.Comment: 11 pages. The Laguerre basis case is adde

Vertically Self-Gravitating ADAFs in the Presence of Toroidal Magnetic Field

Force due to the self-gravity of the disc in the vertical direction is considered to study its possible effects on the structure of a magnetized advection-dominated accretion disc. We present steady-sate self similar solutions for the dynamical structure of such a type of the accretion flows. Our solutions imply reduced thickness of the disc because of the self-gravity. It also imply that the thickness of the disc will increase by adding the magnetic field strength.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrophysics and Space Science

Formation of Small-Scale Condensations in the Molecular Clouds via Thermal Instability

A systematic study of the linear thermal instability of a self-gravitating magnetic molecular cloud is carried out for the case when the unperturbed background is subject to local expansion or contraction. We consider the ambipolar diffusion, or ion-neutral friction on the perturbed states. In this way, we obtain a non-dimensional characteristic equation that reduces to the prior characteristic equation in the non-gravitating stationary background. By parametric manipulation of this characteristic equation, we conclude that there are, not only oblate condensation forming solutions, but also prolate solutions according to local expansion or contraction of the background. We obtain the conditions for existence of the Field lengths that thermal instability in the molecular clouds can occur. If these conditions establish, small-scale condensations in the form of spherical, oblate, or prolate may be produced via thermal instability.Comment: 16 page, accepted by Ap&S

High-order Connectomic Manifold Learning for Autistic Brain State Identification

Previous studies have identified disordered functional (from fMRI) and structural (from diffusion MRI) brain connectivities in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, ‘shape connections’ between brain regions were rarely investigated in ASD – e.g., how morphological attributes of a specific brain region (e.g., sulcal depth) change in relation to morphological attributes in other regions. In this paper, we use conventional T1-w MRI to define morphological connectivity networks, each quantifying shape similarity between different cortical regions for a specific cortical attribute at both low-order and high-order levels. For ASD identification, we present a connectomic manifold learning framework, which learns multiple kernels to estimate a similarity measure between ASD and normal controls (NC) connectomic features, to perform dimensionality reduction for clustering ASD and NC subjects. We benchmark our ASD identification method against supervised and unsupervised state-of-the-art methods, while depicting the most discriminative high- and low-order relationships between morphological regions in the left and right hemispheres

Bivariate genome-wide association meta-analysis of pediatric musculoskeletal traits reveals pleiotropic effects at the SREBF1/TOM1L2 locus

Bone mineral density is known to be a heritable, polygenic trait whereas genetic variants contributing to lean mass variation remain largely unknown. We estimated the shared SNP heritability and performed a bivariate GWAS meta-analysis of total-body lean mass (TB-LM) and total-body less head bone mineral density (TBLH-BMD) regions in 10,414 children. The estimated SNP heritability is 43% for TBLH-BMD, and 39% for TB-LM, with a shared genetic component of 43%. We identify variants with pleiotropic effects in eight loci, including seven established bone mineral density loci: _WNT4, GALNT3, MEPE, CPED1/WNT16, TNFSF11, RIN3, and PPP6R3/LRP5_. Variants in the _TOM1L2/SREBF1_ locus exert opposing effects TB-LM and TBLH-BMD, and have a stronger association with the former trait. We show that _SREBF1_ is expressed in murine and human osteoblasts, as well as in human muscle tissue. This is the first bivariate GWAS meta-analysis to demonstrate genetic factors with pleiotropic effects on bone mineral density and lean mass