Search results for "bioactivity"
showing 10 items of 25 documents
The ethnobotany, phytochemistry and biological properties of genus Ferulago – A review
2020
Abstract Ethnopharmacological relevance The genus Ferulago, belonging to the Apiaceae family, is found mainly in the Mediterranean area, Southwest and Middle Asia, the Caucasus and North Africa. Since ancient times, species of this genus have been largely employed in traditional medicine for their biological properties such as antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antispasmodic, insecticidal, and anti-malaria, cholinesterase inhibition effects, etc. Aims The scope of this paper is to present a comprehensive respect review of this interesting genus including traditional uses, chemical composition of volatile and non-volatile metabolites, and in vitro and in vivo biological properties either util…
Polylactide-based materials science strategies to improve tissue-material interface without the use of growth factors or other biological molecules
2018
In a large number of medical devices, a key feature of a biomaterial is the ability to successfully bond to living tissues by means of engineered mechanisms such as the enhancement of biomineralization on a bone tissue engineering scaffold or the mimicking of the natural structure of the extracellular matrix (ECM). This ability is commonly referred to as "bioactivity". Materials sciences started to grow interest in it since the development of bioactive glasses by Larry Hench five decades ago. As the main goal in applications of biomedical devices and tissue scaffolds is to obtain a seamless tissue-material interface, achieving optimal bioactivity is essential for the success of most biomate…
Edible Insects an Alternative Nutritional Source of Bioactive Compounds: A Review
2023
Edible insects have the potential to become one of the major future foods. In fact, they can be considered cheap, highly nutritious, and healthy food sources. International agencies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), have focused their attention on the consumption of edible insects, in particular, regarding their nutritional value and possible biological, toxicological, and allergenic risks, wishing the development of analytical methods to verify the authenticity, quality, and safety of insect-based products. Edible insects are rich in proteins, fats, fiber, vitamins, and minerals but also seem to contain large amounts of polyphenols able to have a key role in specific bi…
Enhancing Biocompatibility and Antibacterial Activity of Ti6Al4V by Entrapping Ag and Hydroxyapatite Inside Alginate Filled Pores of TiO 2 Layer Grow…
2022
A three-step electrochemical process is developed to grow a coating on Ti6Al4V alloy for biomedical applications aimed to enhance its bioactivity. The coating is composed by a porous titanium oxide filled with Ag, alginic acid, and hydroxyapatite to provide antibacterial properties and, at the same time, osteointegration capability. Anodized and treated with the electrochemical process samples are characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX), X-Ray Diffraction, and Raman Spectroscopy to have information about morphology and composition soon after the fabrication and after immersion in Hanks' solution. Bioactivity of the samples is also prov…
Deposition and characterization of Hydroxyapatite-Chitosan coatings on 304 SS for biomedical devices
2019
During the last years biomaterials have been largely investigated in order to perform and improve biomedical devices. As regards orthopedic field, the most common equipment used (such as implants, bone grafts or screws) are constituted by metallic materials (steel and titanium alloys), characterized by low/medium resistance to corrosion and low osteointegration ability. Furthermore, these factors could produce local inflammations of the tissues surrounding the implants, increasing kinetics of corrosion phenomena. Scientific community has focused the attention on biocoatings interposed between metal and aggressive environment in order to inhibit corrosion. Furthermore, these coatings are abl…
A convolutional neural network for virtual screening of molecular fingerprints
2019
In the last few years, Deep Learning (DL) gained more and more impact on drug design because it allows a huge increase of the prediction accuracy in many stages of such a complex process. In this paper a Virtual Screening (VS) procedure based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is presented, that is aimed at classifying a set of candidate compounds as regards their biological activity on a particular target protein. The model has been trained on a dataset of active/inactive compounds with respect to the Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 1 (CDK1) a very important protein family, which is heavily involved in regulating the cell cycle. One qualifying point of the proposed approach is the use of molec…
Utilisation of natural carotenoids from Momordica cochinchinensis (gac) as health compounds : extraction and bioactvity depending on the origin and o…
2014
The aril of Momordica cochinchinensis (gac), plant from the Cucurbitaceae family, is the richest source of lycopene and β-carotene, which are a strong antioxidant and a pro-vitamin A, respectively, interesting for health-complements. First, a process of soft extraction-fractionation was developed for extracting effectively the natural carotenoids from gac without loss of their original quality. Then, the lycopene and β-carotene extracted from gac were analyzed and characterized. At least 95% of the extracts were composed of the all-trans isomer. They were not degraded during the heat-treatment mimicking formulation processing. Their thermal stereo-mutation was evaluated. Lycopene is more an…
Convolutional architectures for virtual screening
2020
Abstract Background A Virtual Screening algorithm has to adapt to the different stages of this process. Early screening needs to ensure that all bioactive compounds are ranked in the first positions despite of the number of false positives, while a second screening round is aimed at increasing the prediction accuracy. Results A novel CNN architecture is presented to this aim, which predicts bioactivity of candidate compounds on CDK1 using a combination of molecular fingerprints as their vector representation, and has been trained suitably to achieve good results as regards both enrichment factor and accuracy in different screening modes (98.55% accuracy in active-only selection, and 98.88% …
Species-Specific Antioxidant Power and Bioactive Properties of the Extracts Obtained from Wild Mediterranean Calendula Spp. (Asteraceae)
2019
In this study we focused on four taxa of the genus Calendula (C. maritima, C. suffruticosa subsp. fulgida, C. arvensis, and the hybrid between the first two ones), collected in Mediterranean area (Sicily). Six extracts for each species were obtained using solvents with increasing polarity (hexane, ethanol 80%, acetone 70%, and water) and through extraction by supercritical fluids (SFE). It has been observed that the solvent with the highest extraction efficiency was ethanol 80% for all species. However, SFE extracts showed high antioxidant activity comparable to the ethanol 80% extract (polyphenol, DPPH, and reducing power method). These findings were confirmed by in vitro analysis (MTT ass…
Promoter Activation in Dhfq Mutants as an Efficient Tool for Specialized Metabolite Production Enabling Direct Bioactivity Testing
2019
Abstract Natural products (NPs) from microorganisms have been important sources for discovering new therapeutic and chemical entities. While their corresponding biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) can be easily identified by gene‐sequence‐similarity‐based bioinformatics strategies, the actual access to these NPs for structure elucidation and bioactivity testing remains difficult. Deletion of the gene encoding the RNA chaperone, Hfq, results in strains losing the production of most NPs. By exchanging the native promoter of a desired BGC against an inducible promoter in Δhfq mutants, almost exclusive production of the corresponding NP from the targeted BGC in Photorhabdus, Xenorhabdus and Pseud…