Antibacterial Effects of Flavonoids and Their Structure-Activity Relationship Study: A Comparative Interpretation

According to the latest report released by the World Health Organization, bacterial resistance to well-known and widely available antibacterial drugs has become a significant and severe global health concern and a grim challenge to tackle in order to cure infections associated with multidrug-resistant pathogenic microorganisms efficiently. Consequently, various strategies have been orchestrated to cure the severe complications related to multidrug-resistant bacteria effectively. Some approaches involved the retardation of biofilm formation and multidrug-resistance pumps in bacteria as well as the discovery of new antimicrobial agents demonstrating different mechanisms of action. In this regard, natural products namely alkaloids, terpenoids, steroids, anthraquinone, flavonoids, saponins, tannins, etc., have been suggested to tackle the multidrug-resistant bacterial strains owing to their versatile pharmacological effects. Amongst these, flavonoids, also known as polyphenolic compounds, have been widely evaluated for their antibacterial property due to their tendency to retard the growth of a wide range of pathogenic microorganisms, including multidrug-resistant bacteria. The hydroxylation of C5, C7, C3′, and C4′; and geranylation or prenylation at C6 have been extensively studied to increase bacterial inhibition of flavonoids. On the other hand, methoxylation at C3′ and C5 has been reported to decrease flavonoids’ antibacterial action. Hence, the latest information on the antibacterial activity of flavonoids is summarized in this review, with particular attention to the structure–activity relationship of this broad class of natural compounds to discover safe and potent antibacterial agents as natural products.     

Mixed convection on a vertical circular cylinder

The problem of the mixed convection boundary-layer flow past an isothermal vertical circular cylinder is considered in both the cases when the buoyancy forces aid and oppose the development of the boundary layer. A series solution is obtained, valid near the leading edge, and this is extended by a numerical solution of the full equations, which in the aiding case, becomes inaccurate downstream. An approximate solution is also derived which gives a good estimate for the heat transfer near the leading edge and has the correct asymptotic form well downstream. In the opposing case, the boundary layer is seen to separate at a finite distance downstream, with, for moderate values of the buoyancy parameter, the numerical solution indicating a regular behaviour near separation.     

Effect of concentration and particle size on nonlinearity of Au nano-fluid prepared by γ (Co) radiation

Nonlinear properties of Au nano-fluid prepared by γ-radiation method at different concentrations were investigated. Measurements of nonlinear refractive index and nonlinear absorption coefficient were carried out using a single beam Z-scan technique. A green CW laser beam operated at 532 nm was used as excitation source. The Au nano-fluid shows a good third order nonlinear response. The sign of the nonlinear refractive index is found to be negative and the magnitude is in the order of 10⁻⁷ cm²/W. This nonlinear effect increases as the concentration increases from 3.119 × 10⁻⁴ to 2.354 × 10⁻³ M which correspond to particle sizes of 4.0-30.5 nm, respectively. A good linear relationship was obtained between nonlinear refractive index and concentration. However the relationship between nonlinear refractive index and particle size was nonlinear behavior.     

Study of the semileptonic charm decays D(0)-->pi(-)l(+)nu and D(0)-->K(-)l(+)nu

We investigate the decays D(0)-->pi(-)l(+)nu and D(0)-->K(-)l(+)nu, where l is e or mu, using approximately 7 fb(-1) of data collected with the CLEO III detector. We find R(0) identical with B(D(0)-->pi(-)e(+)nu)/B(D(0)-->K(-)e(+)nu)=0.082+/-0.006+/-0.005. Fits to the kinematic distributions of the data provide parameters describing the form factor of each mode. Combining the form factor results and R(0) gives |f(pi)(+)(0)|(2)|V(cd)|(2)/|f(K)(+)(0)|(2)|V(cs)|(2)=0.038(+0.006+0.005)(-0.007-0.003).     

Analysis of natural convection from a column of cold horizontal cylinders using Artificial Neural Network

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) offer an alternative way to tackle complex problems. They can learn from the examples and once trained can perform predictions and generalizations at high speed. They are particularly useful in behavior or system identification. According to the above advantages of ANN in the present paper ANN is used to predict natural convection heat transfer and fluid flow from a column of cold horizontal circular cylinders having uniform surface temperature. Governing equations are solved in a few specified cases by finite volume method to generate the database for training the ANN in the range of Rayleigh numbers of 10⁵–10⁸ and a range of cylinder spacing of 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 diameters, thereafter a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) network is used to capture the behavior of flow and temperature fields and then generalized this behavior to predict the flow and temperature fields for any other Rayleigh numbers. Different training algorithms are used and it is found that the resilient back-propagation algorithm is the best algorithm regarding the faster training procedure. To validate the accuracy of the trained network, comparison is performed among the ANN and available CFD results. It is observed that ANN can be used more efficiently to determine cold plume and thermal field in lesser computational time. Based on the generalized results from the ANN new correlations are developed to estimate natural convection from a column of cold horizontal cylinders with respect to a single horizontal cylinder.     

ΛΛ 6 hypernucleus in α + 2Λ cluster model

The binding energy of the double hypernucleus _ΛΛ ⁶ is calculated in α + 2Λ cluster model using the method of translation invariant basis TIMO. As regards the required interaction potentials we use a density dependent effective ΛN force and a gaussian form for ΛΛ potential. With these interactions a very reasonable value ofB _ΛΛ is obtained if the oscillator states up to the excitation quantum numberN=12 are taken into account in the expansion of wavefunction of the hypernucleus. This value ofN is much smaller than that obtained in an earlier study. This lowering inN value is attributed to a much better choice of ΛN potential used in the present study.     

Rician noise reduction in magnetic resonance images using adaptive non-local mean and guided image filtering

This paper proposes a Rician noise reduction method for magnetic resonance (MR) images. The proposed method is based on adaptive non-local mean and guided image filtering techniques. In the first phase, a guidance image is obtained from the noisy image through an adaptive non-local mean filter. Sobel operators are applied to compute the strength of edges which is further used to control the spread of the kernel in non-local mean filtering. In the second phase, the noisy and the guidance images are provided to the guided image filter as input to restore the noise-free image. The improved performance of the proposed method is investigated using the simulated and real data sets of MR images. Its performance is also compared with the previously proposed state-of-the art methods. Comparative analysis demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme over the existing approaches.     

An efficient approach for the construction of LFT S-boxes using chaotic logistic map

In this paper, we synthesize substitution boxes by the use of chaotic logistic maps in linear fractional transformation. In order to introduce randomness in the construction of S-boxes, the data from the chaotic system is used in linear fractional transformation to add additional unpredictable behavior. The proposed S-box is tested for its strength in encryption applications. The nonlinearity characteristic of the proposed S-box is studied, and the strength of the cipher is quantized in terms of this property. In addition, the behavior of bit changes at the output of the cipher in comparison with the input is also studied. Similarly, the input/output differential is also evaluated for different bit patterns. The results of statistical analyses show superior performance of the proposed S-boxes.