Haemangioma of Cheek Different Presentation and Management

Though haemangioma of cheek is not a very uncommon entity, here we are presenting a case series of four such cases of haemangioma cheek of completely different presentation. One of which is classical maxillary haemangioma and the rest of the others have different and unusual presentations. They all have different radiological features and were managed successfully by different surgical approaches without any recurrence.     

Design and Development of a Medical Image Databank for Assisting Studies in Radiomics

Journal of Digital Imaging - CompreHensive Digital ArchiVe of Cancer Imaging - Radiation Oncology (CHAVI-RO) is a multi-tier WEB-based medical image databank. It supports archiving de-identified...     

Characterization of a Starch Hydrolysing Bacillus flexus U8 Isolated from Rhizospheric Soil of the Paddy Plants

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B: Biological Sciences - One bacterial strain U8 having starch hydrolysing activity was isolated from the rhizospheric soil of rice...     

Issue Information

Recent advances in biochemistry and drug design have placed proteases as one of the critical target groups for developing novel small‐molecule inhibitors. Among all proteases, aspartic proteases have gained significant attention due to their role in HIV/AIDS, malaria, Alzheimer's disease, etc. The binding cleft is covered by one or two β‐hairpins (flaps) which need to be opened before a ligand can bind. After binding, the flaps close to retain the ligand in the active site. Development of computational tools has improved our understanding of flap dynamics and its role in ligand recognition. In the past decade, several computational approaches, for example molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, coarse‐grained simulations, replica‐exchange molecular dynamics (REMD) and metadynamics, have been used to understand flap dynamics and conformational motions associated with flap movements. This review is intended to summarize the computational progress towards understanding the flap dynamics of proteases and to be a reference for future studies in this field.     

Characterization and Mosquitocidal Potency of Bacillus thuringiensis Isolate SB1 from the Sundarbans Mangrove,West Bengal,India

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India Section B: Biological Sciences - Anopheles, Culex and Aedes mosquitoes are serious disease vectors in India including the malaria endemic...     

Identification of neuraminidase inhibitors by structure-based screening: promising new leads for influenza

Human influenza commonly known as seasonal flu which is caused by a RNA virus has been emerging as a major viral infection over the years. Virus neuraminidase inhibitors and M2 protein inhibitors are the agents which have been used to treat this viral infection. Among these two, viral neuraminidases named oseltamivir and zanamivir are most widely used as antiviral agents to treat influenza. But the recent emergence of resistance strains in the treatment with both zanamivir and oseltamivir creates a big problem to treat this viral infection effectively. In this study, we have designed 68 new human influenza virus neuraminidase inhibitors and reported them as new potential antiviral agents against the complex structure of influenza virus neuraminidase and sialic acid using various in silico tools and molecular docking analysis taking zanamivir as prototype.     

Pepsin-like aspartic proteases (PAPs) as model systems for combining biomolecular simulation with biophysical experiments

Pepsin-like aspartic proteases (PAPs) are a class of aspartic proteases which shares tremendous structural similarity with human pepsin. One of the key structural features of PAPs is the presence of a β-hairpin motif otherwise known as flap. The biological function of the PAPs is highly dependent on the conformational dynamics of the flap region. In apo PAPs, the conformational dynamics of the flap is dominated by the rotational degrees of freedom associated with χ1 and χ2 angles of conserved Tyr (or Phe in some cases). However it is plausible that dihedral order parameters associated with several other residues might play crucial roles in the conformational dynamics of apo PAPs. Due to their size, complexities associated with conformational dynamics and clinical significance (drug targets for malaria, Alzheimer''s disease etc.), PAPs provide a challenging testing ground for computational and experimental methods focusing on understanding conformational dynamics and molecular recognition in biomolecules. The opening of the flap region is necessary to accommodate substrate/ligand in the active site of the PAPs. The BIG challenge is to gain atomistic details into how reversible ligand binding/unbinding (molecular recognition) affects the conformational dynamics. Recent reports of kinetics (K_i, K_d) and thermodynamic parameters (ΔH, TΔS, and ΔG) associated with macro-cyclic ligands bound to BACE1 (belongs to PAP family) provide a perfect challenge (how to deal with big ligands with multiple torsional angles and select optimum order parameters to study reversible ligand binding/unbinding) for computational methods to predict binding free energies and kinetics beyond typical test systems e.g. benzamide–trypsin. In this work, i reviewed several order parameters which were proposed to capture the conformational dynamics and molecular recognition in PAPs. I further highlighted how machine learning methods can be used as order parameters in the context of PAPs. I then proposed some open ideas and challenges in the context of molecular simulation and put forward my case on how biophysical experiments e.g. NMR, time-resolved FRET etc. can be used in conjunction with biomolecular simulation to gain complete atomistic insights into the conformational dynamics of PAPs.

Pepsin-like aspartic proteases (PAPs) are a class of aspartic proteases which shares tremendous structural similarity with human pepsin.     

Research Goal-Driven Data Model and Harmonization for De-Identifying Patient Data in Radiomics

Journal of Digital Imaging - There are various efforts in de-identifying patient’s radiation oncology data for their uses in the advancement of research in medicine. Though the task of...     

Nanoparticulate formulations of radiopharmaceuticals: Strategy to improve targeting and biodistribution properties

Application of nanotechnology principles in drug delivery has created opportunities for treatment of several diseases. Nanotechnology offers the advantage of overcoming the adverse biopharmaceutics or pharmacokinetic properties of drug molecules, to be determined by the transport properties of the particles themselves. Through the manipulation of size, shape, charge, and type of nanoparticle delivery system, variety of distribution profiles may be obtained. However, there still exists greater need to derive and standardize definitive structure property relationships for the distribution profiles of the delivery system. When applied to radiopharmaceuticals, the delivery systems assume greater significance. For the safety and efficacy of both diagnostics and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals, selective localization in target tissue is even more important. At the same time, the synthesis and fabrication reactions of radiolabelled nanoparticles need to be completed in much shorter time. Moreover, the extensive understanding of the several interesting optical and magnetic properties of materials in nanoscale provides for achieving multiple objectives in nuclear medicine. This review discusses the various nanoparticle systems, which are applied for radionuclides and analyses the important bottlenecks that are required to be overcome for their more widespread clinical adaptation.