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PurposeThis paper aims to explore the impact of lean, Six Sigma and environmental sustainability on the performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan. The firm performance has been measured in terms of operational, business and environmental performance.Design/methodology/approachA survey-based methodology is adopted for collecting data from the main cities of Punjab, Pakistan. SMEs related to different industries such as service, manufacturing, automotive and retail were targeted. The data gathered were ordinal, and Spearman's correlation test was used as the data analysis technique.FindingsThe findings indicated that the three management styles positively impacted the environmental performance of SMEs. Moreover, no significant relationship was found between the three management styles and the SMEs' business and operational performance.Research limitations/implicationsTo counter the inefficient and wasteful practices of SMEs and their detrimental impact on overall firm performance, SMEs have to refocus and reconfigure their management strategies. It is implied to use lean, Six Sigma and environmental sustainability practices to achieve this goal.Originality/valueThe study empirically investigates the impact of lean, Six Sigma and environmental sustainability on the performance of SMEs in Pakistan, which is the first study to be conducted in the Pakistani context.

Hospital-acquired infections are common in burn patients and are the major contributors of morbidity and mortality. Bacterial infections such as Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii) are difficult to treat due to their biofilm formation and rapidly acquiring resistance to antibiotics. This work presents a newly developed hydrogel that has the potential for treating bacterial wound infections. The hydrogel formulation is based on an antimicrobial peptide (AMP), epsilon-poly-l-lysine (EPL) and catechol, which was cross-linked via mussel-inspired chemistry between the amine and phenol groups. In vitro studies showed that EPL-catechol hydrogels possess impressive antimicrobial and antibiofilm properties toward multidrug-resistant A. baumannii (MRAB). In addition, cytotoxicity study with the clonal mouse myoblast cell line (C2C12) revealed the good biocompatibility of this hydrogel. Furthermore, we created a second-degree burn wound on the mice dorsal skin surface followed by contamination with MRAB. Our results showed that the hydrogel significantly reduced the bacterial burden by more than four orders of magnitude in infected burn wounds. Additionally, there was no significant histological alteration with hydrogel application on mice skin. Based on these results, we concluded that EPL-catechol hydrogel is a promising future biomaterial to fight against multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.

This research aims to analyze a literature review of publications that have incorporated the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) methods. The AHP and ANP methods have contributed to decision-making in complex situations in recent years and possess widespread applications. Such applications are spread over the years with publications in various major areas such as engineering/technology/applied sciences, social sciences, health sciences, and environmental studies. These two methods provide multiple solutions to researchers in these fields, which is why they are being considered in the current study. For this purpose, data was collected from 920 research papers after a vigorous literature review using different search engines. This paper aims to classify the publications on AHP and ANP methods from the years 2000 to 2019 to identify recognized journals based on their indexes. Furthermore, another objective of this study is to compare total publications by year, publications by field by year, and lastly, observe the distribution by country of the studies. This paper concludes that the highest number of publications are from Turkey, and the highest number of publications used AHP method applications in every category. Most of the publications belonged to the technical fields, followed by social sciences. The study concluded that the AHP method is more widely preferred by researchers in almost every field and application because it tends to produce more accurate results than the ANP.

Our daily exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UVR) results in the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), lipids, proteins and DNA damage and alteration in fibroblast structure, thus contributing to skin photoaging. For this reason, the use of natural bioactive compounds with antioxidant activity could be a strategic tool to overcome ultraviolet A (UV-A) induced deleterious effect. Neferine is an alkaloid extract from the seed embryos of lotus (Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn). In the present study, we report the protective effect of neferine against UV-A induced oxidative stress and photoaging in human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs). HDFs subjected to UV-A irradiation showed increased production of ROS and malondialdehyde (MDA). Furthermore, it depleted the cellular enzymatic antioxidant superoxide dismutase (SOD) and non-enzymatic antioxidant glutathione peroxidase (GPx). On the other hand, HDFs treated with neferine followed by UV-A irradiation reversed the process, reduced the ROS and lipid peroxidation and restored the antioxidants pool. Moreover, neferine treatment significantly inhibited UV-A induced matrix metalloproteinase-1 (MMP-1) expression in HDFs. Remarkable morphological and ultrastructural alterations observed in HDFs upon UV-A irradiation, were also reduced with neferine treatment. Taken together, our results suggest that neferine has strong antioxidative and photoprotective properties and thus may be a potential agent for the prevention and treatment of UV-A mediated skin photoaging.