Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a hematological malignancy common in children and adult males. ALL is considered to be on the rise in Pakistan. External, physiological and genetic factors have been found to play a fundamental role in causing the cancer. In the present study, we investigated the external factors like exposure to radiations, chemicals, sunlight, smoking, electronic devices and dietary habits as potential risk factors in relation to ALL. None of these factors were found to be associated with ALL risk in Pakistani population. However, among physiological factors we found significant correlation between psychological stress and ALL incidence. Overrepresentation of B+ve blood group was noted among ALL patients. Replicative potential, telomere modulation, migration / metastasis, unlimited proliferation and metabolic reprogramming are important for tumor development. Genes including GMFG, EpCAM, PCSK9, CTC1 and OBFC1 were studied at transcriptional level to elucidate their role in ALL related to motility, proliferation, lipid metabolism and telomere modulation, respectively. The role of these genes in relation to ALL was not studied before. To study telomere modulation important for leukemia cell survival, telomere length measurement was performed. No significant changes in telomere length were observed. However, at transcriptional level, induced expression of telomere modulating genes (CTC1, OBFC1, hTERT) in ALL patients was observed which could be correlated with telomere length maintenance in leukemia cells. The induced GMFG expression, which is important for cell migration, in leukemia patients indicated that it has potential to be used as a leukemia diagnostic marker. EpCAM related to cell proliferation was not well established in ALL. Its mRNA expression was significantly upregulated in ALL patients. Similarly, PCSK9 which regulates cholesterol metabolism was also induced in ALL. mRNA expression of ALL specific genes like TAL1, BLNK and BLACE were also investigated and found to be upregulated in ALL Pakistani population. They, therefore, could potentially be used as ALL gene markers for early detection and diagnosis of leukemia. xii Next, in in vitro studies, naturally occurring biomolecules like costunolide and eugenol were used for identification of new therapeutic approaches with better treatment outcome. Costunolide, a potent telomerase inhibitor reduced EpCAM and its downstream target gene c-Myc and probably also contributed in inhibiting hTERT expression. Similarly, PCSK9 and LOX1 were significantly down-regulated by antioxidant eugenol. Results from this study suggested that costunolide and eugenol could plausibly be used as therapeutic biomolecules for reducing cancer cell proliferation and growth by limiting the metabolic supply.
Allah has promised to protect Islam. That is why Allah created scholars and Sufis in different periods that served Islam and preached Islam. The preaching and propagation of Islam in India is due to these Sufis. They left their territories and came to India. One of these scholars and Sufis is Maulana Muhammad Shoaib Tordheri, known as Shaikh Sahib. He was the Shaikh of Moulana Abdul Ghafoor (Swat Babaji), that is the most famous Sufi in Swat Khyber Pakhtonkhwa and Shaikh of the Moulana Abdul Rahim Saharan Puri. Moulana Muhammad Shoaib was not a scholar and sufi, he was also a mujahid. He was martyred while fighting against the Sikhs in 1823 A.D. He wrote a book about Sufism. In his book he wrote about seeratul Nabi and companion of Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. After that he discussed circumstances and sayings of Sufis of the all four series (Naqshbandia, Qadria, Cheshtia and Saharwardia) of Sufism. He also described the attributes of the perfect Peer.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has abundant non-trivial applications and Smart Grid is one of them. The IoT capacitate effortless and adept adoption of Smart Grid. Currently, it is anticipated as the mostprevalentmanifestationoftheIoT.SmartGridisemergingasthenextgenerationpowergrid due to its reliability, flexibility, and efficiency. It is a state-of-the-art distributed power generation and supply infrastructure with significant auxiliary traits of intelligence and two-way communication. The utility can monitor and control power consumption of the consumer for load balancing, in real time. Similarly, the consumer can keep a trail of his power usage to plan it as per his affordability or budget. The Smart Grid also furnishes an adequacy to integrate renewable energy sources. Despite the ample amelioration, Smart Grid faces some critical security challenges such as the denial-of-service, message injection, man-in-the-middle and replay attacks etc. Moreover, provision of an IP-based communication system in this very grid has made it more vulnerable to stern securityattacks. Iftheseattacksarenotproperlyaddressed,anadversarycanmaliciouslycompromise the user/device to degrade the performance of the Smart Grid. Itisstrenuoustoemployclassicaltechniquesinordertopreventabove-mentionedsecurityattacks due to soaring communication and computation overhead. Since the Smart Grid is delay sensitive and traffic intensive environment, it is therefore inevitable to concoct and realize security techniquesinsuchawaysothattheydonotpersuadedelayduetocomplexandcomputationintensive cryptographic operations. Theperplexingarchitectureandassortedsecuritydesideratumisthemajorhindrancetoofferaprevailing solution for Smart Grid security. This research work has undertaken to design and develop lightweight authentication protocols for insuring the Smart Grid. The optimal authentication protocolsforSmartGriddelaycriticalenvironmentnotonlywithstandpotentialsecurityattacksbutit also experiences scanty communication and computation overhead due to primitive cryptographic operations. In this research, we have embellished lightweight authentication protocols for endowing secure andreliableenvironmentattheexpenseofinsignificantcommunicationandcomputationoverhead. These protocols are capable of impeding well-nigh all sorts of trivial and non-trivial attacks. The first authentication protocol is based on a hybrid Diffie-Hellman algorithm. This lightweight protocol exploits typical cryptosystems of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) to engender a session key. Additionally, Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) is also employed in it to perpetuate data integrity. Moreover, this authentication protocol promises to commence mutual authentication by averting major attacks such as man-inthe-middle and replay attack. The second authentication protocol is an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-based solution for retaining Smart Grid security. Since ECC promises to offer analogous security clout with significantly reduced key size as compared to other cryptographic security solutions e.g. Diffie-Hellman (D-H), Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and RSA. This proposed protocol realizes mutual authentication with meager resource utilization. It is also verified that the proposed scheme can relentless the security attacks. Keeping in mind the complex and delay sensitive nature of the Smart Grid, a lightweight ECC-based authentication scheme is proposed. This ECC-based protocol not only provides mutual authentication with low computation and communication cost but also withstand absolute familiar security attacks. The third security solution is realized through bilinear pairing. This protocol enables the smart meters to get connected with utility control anonymously to avail the services provided by them. The smart meters realize this objective with the private key in the absence of trusted authority. The trusted authority is involved only during the registration phase. Thereafter, the fourth scheme presented in this research work is actually an enhanced identity-based key establishment protocol. This enhanced scheme is introduced after identifying the weaknesses in the protocol presented by Mohammadali et al. (published in IEEE Trans on Smart Grid, 2018). The formal and informal security analysis is carried out under predefined adversarial threat model to verify the robustness of the proposed authentication protocols against stern attacks. BurrowsAbadi-Needham logic (BAN logic) is utilized to evaluate the integrity of the exchanged information. In the end, the performance of the proposed authentication protocols is compared with recently presented related protocols in the literature. Performance comparisons reveal the computation and communication requirements of the proposed protocols as compared to homologous protocols.