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The treatment of drug-resistant cancer is a clinical challenge, hence screening for novel anticancer drugs is critically important. In the present study we investigated the anti-tumor potential of three plant-derived flavone compounds 3-hydroxy flavone (3-HF), 6-hydroxy flavone (6-HF) and 7-hydroxy flavone (7-HF) either alone or combined with silica nanoparticles (3-HF+NP, 6-HF+NP and 7-HF+NP) on the human breast carcinoma cell lines MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7, as well as on non-tumorigenic normal breast epithelial cells (MCF-10). The IC50 values of these flavone compounds loaded with NP (flavones+NP) in these cell lines were determined to be 1.5µg/ml without affecting the viability of normal MCF-10 cells. Additionally, we found that combination of flavones with NP significantly induced apoptosis in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cancer cells using annexin-V/PI double staining followed by flow cytometry analysis. Furthermore, flavones+NP increased the expression of cytochrome C and caspase 9 mediating growth arrest of these cancer cells. Most importantly, combination of flavones with NP significantly abolished the expression of ATF-3, which in turn is responsible for the proliferation and invasion of bone metastatic breast cancer cells. Our data revealed the potential therapeutic effects of these flavones in fighting breast cancer cells and provided the first insight concerning the underlying molecular mechanisms.

Securing medical images are a very essential process in medical image authentication. Medical image watermarking is a very popular tool to achieve this goal. In this paper, an extremely fast, highly accurate, and robust algorithm is proposed for watermarking both gray-level and color medical images. In the proposed method, a scrambled binary watermark is embedded in the host medical image. Simplified exact kernels are used to compute the moments of the polar complex exponential transform (PCET) for the host gray-level images and the moments of the quaternion PCET for the host color images without approximation errors. The stability of the computed moments enables us to use higher order moments in a perfect reconstruction of the watermarked medical images. The accurate moment invariant to rotation, scaling, and translation ensures the robustness of the proposed watermarking algorithm against geometric attacks. Performed experiments clearly show very high visual imperceptibility and robustness to different levels of geometric distortions and common signal processing attacks. The implementation of parallel multi-core CPU and GPU result in a tremendous reduction of the overall watermarking times. For a color image of size 256 × 256, the watermarking time is accelerated by 20× and 11× using a GPU and a CPU with 16 cores, respectively.

A series of novel quinones was synthesized by reacting tetrabromo-p-benzoquinone with amino oligoIJethylene glycol) dendrons of generation numbers g = 0–2. According to the performed shake-flask experiments, their aqueous solubility (S = 18 mg l−1 –1.6 g ml−1 ) and partition coefficients (logPoct/wat = 2.53–0.21) can be tuned in a wide range as a function of g. In vitro cytotoxicity assays of tetrabromo-pbenzoquinone and its derivatives against MCF-7 human breast cancer cells showed a concentration- and generation-specific biological activity with IC50-values as low as 0.8 μM. Further investigations revealed a considerable selectivity against cancer cells, as indicated by a weak cytotoxicity against human skin fibroblast cells (>80% survival) within the studied range of concentrations. The results demonstrate that these novel amino oligoIJethylene glycol) dendrons depict versatile tools to ameliorate physical and pharmacological characteristics of extremely hydrophobic molecules and make them susceptible to biological applications.

the sky is a basic component in outdoor images. Due to the low gradient values of the sky, it has high priority in seam removing for content aware image resizing and the result of enlarging image contributes obvious artificial pixels. The proportion of images which contains sky is over 40% of the daily recent explored images on Flickr (see section V). This paper presents a new technique for annotated outdoor image compression (AOIC) depending on sky replacing. We compress the outdoor images by replacing the sky region with the nearest sky in a predefined sky database to reduce image size. Our work is composed of two stages: encoding stage and decoding stage. In the encoding stage, we use sky annotation polygon to distinguish sky and non-sky regions. The sky features are extracted from the sky region (e.g. sky type, mean HSV, cloud type, and sun existence/relative position). These features are used to find the nearest sky feature from a predefined database of sky features. The sky ID and the sky polygon vertices are composed with non-sky region image. On the decoding stage, we use the sky ID to load the sky from the predefined sky database and compose the sky with the non-sky region (compressed image). Our method is tested using the standard outdoor images of LabelMe database which contain sky. Our method removes the sky and replaces it instead of shrinking the sky region in content aware image resize. Our AOIC can be used for reducing the file size of any image formats of outdoors that contains sky.

Orthogonal moments and their invariants to similarity transformations for monochrome and gray-scale images are widely used in many pattern recognition and image processing applications. Quaternion orthogonal moments are used with color images. Recently, the multi-channel framework is proposed as a successful alternative of the quaternion orthogonal moments in representation and recognition of the color images. In this paper, a new set of multi-channel orthogonal moments and their invariants to rotation, scaling and translation (RST) is proposed for color image representation and recognition. The proposed multi-channel moments are based on the orthogonal radial substituted Chebyshev functions. The multi-channel orthogonal radial substituted Chebyshev moments (MORSCMs) are defined in polar coordinates over a unit circle. An accurate kernel-based method is utilized for accurate computation of the MORSCMs. A series of experiments is performed to validate this new set of multi-channel moments and compare its performance with the existing quaternion and multi-channel orthogonal moments. The obtained results ensure the superiority of the proposed MORSCMs over all existing moments in representation and recognition of the color images.

The screening of potential antioxidant activities of hydrophobic (ethyl acetate) and hydrophilic (polysaccharide) extracts from both mycelia and fermentation media of eleven algicolous fungi was performed using three antioxidant assays. Algicolous fungi were able to ferment low-cost nutrients composed of potato infusion, glucose, and natural seawater and produce hydrophobic and hydrophilic metabolites with antioxidant properties. Significant differences were observed in antioxidant activities of extracts from the various species evaluated using total antioxidant activity (TAA), hydroxyl radical scavenging activity (HRSA), and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), as well as their total sugar contents (TSC) of hydrophilic extracts and total phenolic contents (TPC) of hydrophobic extracts. TSC of endopolysaccharides was higher than exopolysaccharides and showed a significant correlation with both TAA and FRAP. Most of mycelial extracts were richer in phenolics than fermentation media, and TPC of hydrophobic extracts was significantly correlated with their FRAP. Mycelial extracts for most of algicolous fungi showed higher antioxidant activities than fermentation media. Both hydrophobic and hydrophilic extracts of algicolous fungi showed good antioxidant properties, especially as hydrogen-donating antioxidants, which could be considered for future applications in medicine, food production, or cosmetic industry.

Agarase is a promising biocatalyst that catalyze the hydrolysis of agar or agarose and produce oligosaccharides with several biotechnological applications. Agarase production by Dendryphiella arenaria was optimized using a natural low-cost medium composed of the red alga Palisada perforata and natural seawater. The results showed that seaweed biomass and seawater concentrations were the most important factors influencing agarase production. After optimization, the agarase activity was enhanced to 2.5 ± 0.3 U/mL. The crude agarase exhibited a wide pH (4‒10) stability with residual activity more than 75%. The enzyme showed high thermostability at 40 °C, and a moderate thermostability at 50, 60, 70 °C. Several parameters of thermal inactivation kinetics and thermodynamics were calculated, and suggested that the enzyme would be thermostable. Enzymatic saccharification of alkali extracted polysaccharides from the red macroalgal biomass was also optimized with respect to substrate concentration, enzyme dosage, and temperature and proceeded optimally at 0.15% substrate, 40 °C with enzyme dosage 0.9 mL/mL substrate. Under these conditions, the enzymatic saccharification yielded 647.96 mg reducing sugars/g substrate. This study therefore describes an improved, effective, and low-cost process for agarase and fermentable sugar production from seaweed biomass.