Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is associated with diverse gastric disorders leading to gastric carcinoma, the third leading cause of gastric mortality. Being a genetically highly diverse bacterium, H. pylori displays high variation among virulence factors associated with clinical outcomes of infection. Most important virulent factors include VacA and CagA encoded by almost 70% of the strains. These virulent proteins can interfere with multiple cellular activities and alter various host signaling pathways leading to cell proliferation, cytoskeletal rearrangements, and disruption of cell-cell junctions. The adapted virulence mechanism by the organism results into a high antibiotic resistance and hence contributing towards an increased global burden of gastric infections and carcinogenesis. Thus far, none of the conventional treatment regimens results in complete pathogen eradication, gastroduodenal ulcer relapse and bacterial resistance. The organism adopts various routes to enter the host cells for persistent colonization and pathogenicity. Besides the type IV secretion system, it also targets the epithelial barriers, tight junction proteins and the potent barrier adapter proteins including zonula occludens, claudins, and connexins. Dysregulation of zonula occluden-1 (Zo-1), Claudin-2 (CLDN2) and Connexin32(CX32) has already been reported during H. pylori infection but the actual mechanism is still unclear. This study aimed to unravel the mechanisms of modifying cell adhesion and dysregulation of ZO-1, CLDN2 and CX32 in the presence of pathogenic proteins. Molecular events such as post translational modifications and crosstalk ABSTRACT 2 between phosphorylation, O-glycosylation, palmitoylation and methylation within these junction proteins are explored which may compromise their integrity. Various novel PTM sites have been identified within junction proteins which can be further targeted to infer their potential impact in animal models. A qualitative logic-based model is designed highlighting the situation-dependent dynamic behaviors of the host and pathogenic proteins before and after infection, verified by the available experimental data. The model effectively illustrates the key regulatory mechanisms of tight junctions and how they respond to H. pylori infection. Model reflects the sequence of events and captures the logical interactions among entities and clearly depicts that, as a result of specific kinases, expression of CX32 and ZO-1 decreases up to significant levels whereas CLDN2 gets overexpressed to promote paracellular cation leak. The study also attempted to propose vaccines as a promising strategy to combat H. pylori mediated infections, effectively. Thus, a reverse vaccinology approach has been successfully employed to predict the potential vaccine candidates against H. pylori. The predicted potential vaccine candidates include VacA, BabA, SabA, FecA, and Omp16. Multivalent subunit vaccine constructs are designed with aim to induce better antigenic responses than a univalent subunit vaccine. Thus, surface-exposed, conserved and antigenic epitopes from the predicted candidate proteins are screened to design broad-spectrum poly-epitope based peptide vaccines. Seven novel poly-epitope proteins are designed along with suitable adjuvant (Cholera Toxin Subunit B adjuvant at 5’ end) and linkers (GPGPG and EAAAK) against H. pylori by predicting the best possible combinations of predicted epitopes. The proposed poly-epitope vaccines candidates can bind efficiently with A2, A3, B7 ABSTRACT 3 and DR1 superfamilies of HLA alleles, as checked in silico. They also form stable and significant interactions with Toll-like receptor 2 and Toll-like receptor 4. Keeping in mind the laborious and time-consuming process of vaccine candidate predictions, a highly scalable, multi-mode, and configurable pipeline has also been designed, term as VacSol. The pipeline efficiently integrates well-known and robust algorithms/tools for bacterial proteome analysis. The utility of VacSol is tested using the H. pylori reference strain (26695) as a benchmark. The study provided insights into H. pylori mediated virulence and infection and improved our understanding of the mechanism of bacterial pathogenesis. The described methodology can be easily reproduced, and can be extended to other bacterial infections.
قول ِمحال:(Paradox) "ایسا تضادی بیان جو مسلمہ تصور کے برعکس ہو، پیراڈاکس کہلاتا ہے۔" لیکن قولِ محال محض تضاد نہیں بلکہ قولِ محال جہاں شروع ہوا ہے، وہاں تضاد ختم ہونے لگتا ہے۔ تضاد تو ایک عمومی حقیقت ہے جس کے فنی بیان میں دلکشی تو ہے، صنعت کاری کا جمالِ فریب نہیں۔ اسے اتحادِ ضدین بھی کہہ سکتے ہیں۔ "پیراڈاکس’’ انیسویں صدی کی جدید صنعتِ بیان ہے جو ایک نوع کی ذہنی ورزش ہے۔نثر و نظم میں قولِ محال پیدا کرنا اور اس سے حِظ یاب ہونا، ترقی یافتہ ذہن کا کام ہے۔یہ انگریزی ادب سے ہمارے ہاں آیا۔انگریزی ادب میں آسکر وائلڈ، چسٹرٹن اور برنارڈ شا اس کے نقیب ہیں۔اردو شاعری میں قولِ محال کی مثالیں دیکھیے: ہم نے جس شخص کو توقیرِ شناسائی دی اس نے خوش ہوکے ہمیں عزتِ رسوائی دی (دوسرے مصرعہ میں قولِ محال "عزتِ رسوائی"ہے) جہلِ خرد نے دن یہ دکھائے! گھٹ گئے انساں، بڑھ گئے سائے (پہلے مصرعہ میں قولِ محال "جہلِ خرد’’ ہے) (پروفیسر انور جمال کی تصنیف "ادبی اصطلاحات’’ مطبوعہ نیشنل بْک فاؤنڈیشن، اشاعتِ چہارم، مارچ 2017ئ ، صفحہ نمبر 144 سے انتخاب) ابہام:(Ambiguity) ابہام ایک انگریزی اصطلاح ہے جسے اردو ادب میں بھی استعمال کیا جاتا ہے۔ابہام کی صورت حال اس وقت رونما ہوتی ہے جب کسی لفظ، محاورے، جملے، اشارے وغیرہ کی ایسی ترسیل کی جائے کہ اس سے ایک کی بجائے کئی معانی اور مطالب ممکن ہوں۔ ابہام کا ایک عام پہلو عدم تعین ہے۔ یہ ہر خیال یا بیان کا خاصہ ہے جس کے ارادی معانی قطعی طور کسی اصول یا طریق? کار کی روشنی میں سلجھائے نہیں جا سکتے جس میں مقررہ اقدامات شامل ہوں۔ ابہام کی مثالیں: کئی الفاظ جن کا عام طور سے استعمال کیا جاتا ہے، مختلف لوگوں کے لیے مختلف معانی کے حامل ہوتے ہیں۔ مثلًا لمبا یا...
Ijtiha'd is to make utmost endeavor in the light of the basic sources of Islam, the Qur'an and Sunnah to develop the most viable rulings on the new challenges of the time. Muslim scholars have always risen to new challenges. In the contemporary period many Muslim scholars attempted to resolve new problems keeping in view the very objectives of Islamic Law (mtufd al-shari’ah) , which is totally different from literal understanding and application of the rulings of the Qur'an and Sunnah. This article seeks to highlight the contribution of some Muslim scholars in the contemporary period to the application of matpsid al-shari'ah as a principle of ijtihud
Essential oils of different medicinal and aromatic plants have been potential candidates as source of food preservation, pharmaceuticals, alternative medicines and natural therapies in addition to their pharmacological properties like hepatoprotective, carminative, anticarcinogenic and antiviral effects. In present study some selected plants from Pothohar plateau were collected and subjected to essential oil extraction by hydrodistillation followed by assessment of their physical parameters like color, specific gravity, % yield etc and their biological activities including antioxidant, antimicrobial and cytotoxic attributes. The oils were then characterized by using GC and GC-MS techniques to find the chemical constituents. Overall the examined oils exhibited good antioxidant and antimicrobial behavior. To the best of our knowledge the essential oil of Parthenium hysterophorus has never been reported with regard to its composition as well as biological activities before present study. In general, Trachyspermum ammi and Cuminum cyminum essential oils showed significant activity in most of the assays performed in this study. Both showed remarkable potential for scavenging of DPPH free radical with IC50 values 2.61and 16.86 μg/mL, respectively and inhibited linoleic acid by 80.73 and 79.36% respectively. For T. ammi most sensitive bacterium was Streptococcus mutans (Inhibition zone=19.7mm; MIC=1.41 mg/mL) and fungus was Ganoderma lucidum (Inhibition zone=17.0mm; MIC=1.72 mg/mL) while for C. cyminum most sensitive bacterium was Bacillus subtilis (Inhibition zone=27.3mm; MIC=1.10 mg/mL) and fungus was Ganoderma lucidum (Inhibition zone=27.0mm; MIC=1.40 mg/mL). Both T. ammi and C. cyminum exhibited minimum hemolysis of human erythrocytes i.e. 7.98 and 4.51% respectively at 0.5 mg/mL concentration. GC-MS analysis revealed that thymol (37.75%) was the major component of T. ammi essential oil while cumaldehyde (24.10%) in C. cyminum essential oil. All the experiments were done in triplicate and mean ± S.D. was calculated.