Microbial hydroxylation of progesterone occurred in the culture of Acremonium strictum PTCC 5282 to produce two hydroxylated pregnene-like steroids. The metabolites were purified and characterized using spectroscopic methods and identified as 15alpha-hydroxyprogesterone and 15alpha-hydroxydeoxycorticosterone.

Food and feedstuff contamination with aflatoxins (AFTs) is a serious health problem for humans and animals, especially in developing countries. The present study evaluated antifungal activities of two lactic acid bacteria (LAB) against growth and aflatoxin production of toxigenic Aspergillus parasiticus. The mycelial growth inhibition rate of A. parasiticus PTCC 5286 was investigated in the pre...

PURPOSE Azithromycin (AZI) is a new macrolide antibiotic with a better activity against intracellular gram negative bacteria in comparison with Erythromycin. The purpose of this research was to prepare AZI nanoparticles (NPs) using PLGA polymer and to compare the effectiveness of prepared nanoparticles with untreated AZI solution. METHODS AZI NPs were prepared by Modified Quasi-Emulsion Solve...

BACKGROUND The indiscriminate use of antibiotics in the treatment of infectious diseases can increase the development of antibiotic resistance. Therefore, there is a big demand for new sources of antimicrobial agents and alternative treatments for reduction of antibiotic dosage required to decrease the associated side effects. OBJECTIVES In this study, the synergistic action of aminoglycoside...

Cleft Palate (CP) assessments based on phonetic transcription are the "gold standard" therapy outcome measure, despite reliability difficulties. Here we propose a novel perceptual evaluation, applied to ultrasound-visual biofeedback (U-VBF) therapy and therapy using visual articulatory models (VAMs) for two children with repaired submucous CP. Three comparisons were made: post VAM, post U-VBF a...

Background: Probiotics are living organisms that are beneficial for human health. Lactobacillus species has been considered as probiotic bacteria due to their adjustment of human immune responses and therapeutic effects in inflammatory disorders. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effects of Lactobacillus probiotic strains on toll-like receptors (TLR2 and TLR4) expression in HT29 ...

An in vitro study was conducted to investigate docetaxel as a radiation sensitizer in four canine (mammary carcinoma— CMT12 and CMT25, osteosarcoma—OS2.4, and transitional cell carcinoma—PTCC), and one feline cancer cell line (oral squamous cell carcinoma—SCCF1) to provide a basis for combination therapy in clinical patients. Cells were exposed to docetaxel followed by a single dose of radiatio...

We describe our work on Greek Named Entity Recognition using comparatively three different machine learning techniques: (i) Support Vector Machines (SVM), (ii) Maximum Entropy and (iii) Onetime, a shortcut method based on previous work of one of the authors. The majority of our system’s features use linguistic knowledge provided by: morphology, punctuation, position of the lexical units within ...

BACKGROUND Cucurbitacins are mostly found in the members of the family Cucurbitaceae and are responsible for the bitter taste of cucumber. Pharmacological activities such as anti-bacterial and anti-tumor effects have been attributed to these structurally divers triterpens. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of potassium phosphite (KPhi) and chitosan on Cucurbitacin E (CuE) conc...