X-ray fluorescence spectrometric determination of germanium after extraction with polyurethane foam

Germanium is extracted onto polyurethane foam as molybdogermanate, and determined by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry in the dried foam. The extraction is effective between pH 0.5 and 3.7 and as little as 7 μg of germanium can be detected in 100 ml of aqueous solution.     

Synthetic approaches toward the reserpine

Reserpine is an indole alkaloid, antipsychotic, and antihypertensive drug that has been used for the control of high blood pressure and for the relief of psychotic symptoms. It was first isolated in 1952 from the dried root of Rauwolfia serpentina whose molecular structure was established in 1953 and natural configuration was published in 1955. The first total synthesis of reserpine was reported by Woodward in 1958. This review article updates current multistep synthetic approaches toward the reserpine natural product and its analogues.     

Synthetic approaches toward piperidine related structures: A review

Abstract

The current review covers explosive development of various synthetic approaches for piperidine scaffold and its analogues in the last few decades. The piperidine ring system is a key motif in many natural alkaloids and synthetic organic compounds. Further, piperidine moiety has gained significant consideration in drug discovery due to its wide range of therapeutic applications.     

A Novel Image Encryption Scheme Based on Elliptic Curves over Finite Rings

Image encryption based on elliptic curves (ECs) is emerging as a new trend in cryptography because it provides high security with a relatively smaller key size when compared with well-known cryptosystems. Recently, it has been shown that the cryptosystems based on ECs over finite rings may provide better security because they require the computational cost for solving the factorization problem and the discrete logarithm problem. Motivated by this fact, we proposed a novel image encryption scheme based on ECs over finite rings. There are three main steps in our scheme, where, in the first step, we mask the plain image using points of an EC over a finite ring. In step two, we create diffusion in the masked image with a mapping from the EC over the finite ring to the EC over the finite field. To create high confusion in the plain text, we generated a substitution box (S-box) based on the ordered EC, which is then used to permute the pixels of the diffused image to obtain a cipher image. With computational experiments, we showed that the proposed cryptosystem has higher security against linear, differential, and statistical attacks than the existing cryptosystems. Furthermore, the average encryption time for color images is lower than other existing schemes.     

Infection Dynamics of ATG8 in Leishmania: Balancing Autophagy for Therapeutics

In many regions of the world, Leishmaniasis is a cause of substantial mortality and ailment. Due to impediment in available treatment, development of novel and effective treatments is indispensable. Significance of autophagy has been accentuated in infectious disease as well as in Leishmaniasis, and it is having capability to be manifested as a therapeutic target. By evincing autophagy as a novel therapeutic regime, this study emphasized on the critical role of ATG4.1-ATG8 and ATG5-ATG12 complexes in Leishmania species. The objective here was to identify ATG8 as a potential therapeutic target in Leishmania. R71T, P56E, R18P are the significant mutations which shows detrimental effect on ATG8 while Arg276, Arg73, Cys75 of ATG4.1 and Val88, Pro89, Glu116, Asn117, and Gly120 are interacting residues of ATG8. Along with this, we also bring into spotlight an enticing role of Thiabendazole derivatives that interferes with the survival mechanisms by targeting ATG8. Further, the study claims that thiabendazole can be a potential drug candidate to target autophagy process in the infectious disease Leishmaniasis.     

Complexation behavior of gelatin with amphiphilic drug imipramine hydrochloride as studied by conductimetry,surface tensiometry and circular dichroism studies

Herein we report our studies carried out on the interaction between IMP and gelatin in aqueous medium at 25 °C using conductimetry, surface tensiometry and circular dichroism (CD) techniques. Both surface tensiometry and conductimetry results indicate that the drug interacts with the gelatin in a surfactant-like manner, i.e., both critical aggregation (cac) and polymer saturation points (psp) were observed. The interaction starts with the formation of a highly surface-active complex as revealed by the lowering of surface tension on the addition of drug to the macromolecule. The decrease in cac on increasing gelatin concentration is an indication of the strong interaction between gelatin and IMP. However, at low concentration of gelatin the interaction was not much strong as exposed by surface tension study, i.e., the cac was not very clear (as with higher gelatin concentrations). As usual, the psp increased on increasing the gelatin concentration and was always higher than the critical micelle concentration of the drug in pure aqueous medium. Using CD measurements the influence of IMP on the secondary structure of gelatin in aqueous solutions was also investigated. CD studies (performed at very low drug concentrations) illustrated that the random coil content of gelatin increases with increasing drug concentration. Free energies of aggregation (ΔG_agg) and micellization (ΔG_mic) were computed with the help of degrees of micelle ionization obtained from the specific conductivity – [IMP] plots.