Journal of Coastal Life Medicine

178-182

Authors: Fikre Mammo, Milkyas Endale

Natural products are the prominent sources of drugs to combat various infectious diseases. The rapid progress of multi-resistance and pan-resistant pathogens to various medicines represents today a major challenge. The search for novel natural products requires a quick and efficient approach to distinguish novel compounds from the known ones, a process called dereplication. Dereplication strategy is generic and time-saving, avoids isolation/purification of known compounds, enables an efficient liquid chromatography peak annotation of most of the studied compounds and can be well adapted for plant chemotaxonomy, phytochemical screening and metabolite profiling. In this review, recent developments of hyphenated techniques towards dereplication of active compounds, chemotaxonomy, metabolite profiling and rapid detection of novel compounds in medicinal plant extracts are presented.

187-192

Authors: Vijai Lakshmi, Prashant Khare, Pragya Misra, Mahendra Nath Srivastava, Anuradha Dube

Objective: To evaluate the antileishmanial activity of a marine sponge Haliclona oculata. Methods: The crude methanol extract was prepared from the freshly collected sponge and its three fractions were also prepared by maceration method. The antileishmanial activity of these extract and fractions was tested against Leishmania donovani. Results: The antileishmanial activity was tested both in vitro and in vivo. The crude methanol extract exerted almost complete inhibition of promastigotes (81.0%依6.9%) and 78.8%依5.2% inhibition of intracellular amastigotes at 100 μg/mL with IC50 values of 29.5 μg/mL and 40.6 μg/mL, respectively. The treatment of 500 mg/kg (p.o.) of the crude methanol extract for 5 d for Leishmania donovani infected hamsters resulted in 78.35%依10.20% inhibition of intracellular amastigotes. At a lower dose (250 mg/kg), it exhibited poor efficacy. Among the fractions, highest in vitro (>75%) and in vivo (84.3%依10.2%) antileishmanial activity was observed in n-chloroform fraction with IC50 values of 54.2 μg/mL and 61 μg/mL against promastigotes and intracellular amastigotes, respectively. Hexane fraction and n-butanol (both insoluble and soluble) fractions were found inactive in vitro and in vivo. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that this marine sponge has the potential to provide new insight toward development of an effective antileishmanial agent and, hence, more exhaustive studies are needed for exploiting the vast marine resources of the world to combat the scourge of several parasitic diseases.

199-203

Authors: Naeema Elahi, Quratulan Ahmed, Levent Bat, Farzana Yousuf

Objective: To determine common physico-chemical parameters of coastal water. Methods: Physicochemical properties of water were determined according to the standards of the American Public Health Association. Generally, all those parameters were recorded a small variation between stations. The variation in physico-chemical parameters like salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen and pH at Gwadar (Coastal water of Balochistan) were recorded. Results: The range of air temperature of coastal water of Balochistan during 2004 and 2006 varies from 25 ºC to 37 ºC, water temperature ranged from 15.00 ºC to 33.00 ºC, pH ranged from 7.08 to 8.95, salinity ranged from 37.4‰ to 41.3‰ and dissolved oxygen ranged from 5.32 to 8.67 mg/L. Conclusions: Results showed that these parameters of Balochistan coast of Pakistan is not dangerous for marine habitat and the use of these parameters in monitoring programs to assess ecosystem health has the potential to inform the general public and decision-makers about the state of the coastal ecosystems. To save this vital important habitat, the government agencies and scientists should work with proper attention.

211-213

Authors: Nihan Ziyade, Sermet Koc, Fatih Abali

Objective: To assess the presence of hepatitis B surface antigen, one of the serologic markers of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, in postmortem blood samples from autopsy cases using ELISA, and to compare the results with those obtained by PCR, which is the gold standard method in assessing HBV infection. Methods: The HBV test results of the blood samples from 880 autopsy cases determined in our laboratory, were retrospectively studied. Results: When compared with the gold standard method PCR, the sensitivity and specificity of postmortem ELISA were 100% and 84.1%, respectively. Conclusions: The increasingly used molecular diagnostic methods, such as PCR, should be used in cases where serological tests remain insufficient.We think that prospective studies on the comparison of ELISA and PCR assessment of postmortem blood samples with larger material should be carried out.

220-227

Authors: Nouasri Ahmed, Dob Tahar, Krimats Soumia, Dahmane Dahmane, Toumi Mohamed, Lynda Lamari, Chelgoume Chabane, Racheme Farida

Objective: To investigate the chemical composition, antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of essential oil of Santolina chamaecyparissus L. cultivated in Algeria. Methods: The chemical composition of hydrodistilled essential oil from flowering aerial parts has been analyzed by gas chromatograph and gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer techniques. The antioxidant activities conducted by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl scavenging test and β-carotene bleaching test. The antimicrobial activity was realised by agar disc diffusion method and cornell medical index was determined by agar dilution method in solid medium. Results: About 36 components accounting more than 82% of the total oil were identified. Oxygenated monoterpenes was the main fraction (54.66%) and was represented by artemisia ketone (40.33%) as major component of this oil. The other major constituents were (Z)-thujone (9.82%), (2Z,6E)-farnesol (7.30%) and limonene (6.87%) and concerning antiradical scavenging test (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) had demonstrated a weak activity obtained with an EC50 of (43.01±8.04) and moderate activity for β-carotene bleaching test (47.00±3.13) at 120 min. In the other hand, this oil was found effective against all tested strains except Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Aspergillus species. This activity was ranging from 10 mm to 24 mm with the lowest minimum inhibitory concentration value between under 0.070 μg/mL to upper 9 μg/mL. Conclusions: The results provided evidence that the studied plant might indeed be potential sources of natural antioxidant and antimicrobial agents.

233-240

Authors: Nkwocha Chinelo, Njoku Obioma Uzoma

Objective: To determine the beneficial effects of the methanol extract of Synsepalum dulcificum on some biochemical parameters. Methods: In this study, rats were orally administered (gavage) with methanol extracts at doses of 0 mg/kg (Group 1, as normal group), 100 mg/kg (Group 2), 200 mg/kg (Group 3) and 500 mg/kg (Group 4) body weight per day for 28 d. Results: Acute toxicity study showed that the methanol extract was not toxic to rats up to 5 000 mg/kg. From the results, the 100 mg/kg doses of the extract significantly (P<0.05) reduced serum levels of bilirubin, low density lipoprotein, alanine aminotransferase and glucose after 14 d compared with those after 28 d. A significant difference (P<0.05) was observed in the malondialdehyde and serum protein concentration in Group 4 while glucose concentration decreased significantly (P<0.05) in Group 1 and Group 4 after 14 d compared with 28 d. The high density lipoprotein significantly increased (P<0.05) in Group 3. Conclusions: The fruit has no negative effect on some biochemical parameters in albino rats.

245-252

Authors: Zifeng Yang, Hongtao Yu, George P. Huang, Ryan Schwieterman, Bryan Ludwig

Objective: To study the hemodynamics of an anatomic internal carotid artery aneurysm derived from a patient-specific model and then manipulate into two phantom morphologies: one growing uniformly by size and the other changing shape unevenly. Methods: The computational model of the saccular, internal carotid artery, aneurysm was constructed from 3D rotational, digitally subtracted, catheter angiography images. Computational fluid dynamics simulations were performed under pulsatile cardiac flow conditions. Velocity vectors, streamlines, pressure, and wall shear stress (WSS) and its variance distributions were quantitatively visualized. Results: The maximum pressure and WSS from the time-averaged distribution on the inside saccular surface of the original case are 415.38 and 17.61 Pa. In contrast, the bi-lobed shape gives rise to higher peak values of pressure (461.00 Pa) and WSS (33.20 Pa) on the saccular dome. Conversely, the evenly enlarged aneurysm actually results in a slightly lower peak pressure (399.58 Pa) and drastically decreased WSS (9.81 Pa). Conclusions: The current study indicates that the size of the aneurysm should not be the only determining factor for the rupture risk consideration, the irregularity of the aneurysm shape and the corresponding aberrant hemodynamics might be a more important factor to consider for risk assessment.