Antimicrobial activities of the crude ethanolic extracts of five plants were screened against multidrug resistant (MDR) strains of Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Candida albicans. ATCC strains of Streptococcus mutans, Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecalis, Streptococcus bovis, Pseudimonas aeruginosa, Salmonella typhimurium, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Candida albicans were also tested. The strains that showed resistance against the maximum number of antibiotics tested were selected for an antibacterial assay. The MDR strains were sensitive to the antimicrobial activity of Acacia nilotica, Syzygium aromaticum and Cinnamum zeylanicum, whereas they exhibited strong resistance to the extracts of Terminalia arjuna and Eucalyptus globulus. Community-acquired infections showed higher sensitivity than the nosocomial infections against these extracts. The most potent antimicrobial plant was A. nilotica (MIC range 9.75-313µg/ml), whereas other crude plant extracts studied in this report were found to exhibit higher MIC values than A. nilotica against community acquired as well as nosocomial infection. This study concludes that A. nilotica, C. zeylanicum and S. aromaticum can be used against multidrug resistant microbes causing nosocomial and community acquired infections.

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Figure 1: A model rendered at real-time rates (approximately half the performance of the standard per-vertex lighting model on an NVIDIA GeForce 3) with several BRDFs approximated using the technique in this paper. From left to right: satin (anisotropic Poulin-Fournier model), krylon blue, garnet red, cayman, mystique (Cornell measured data), leather, and velvet (CURET measured data). AbstractA bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) describes how a material reflects light from its surface. To use arbitrary BRDFs in real-time rendering, a compression technique must be used to represent BRDFs using the available texture-mapping and computational capabilities of an accelerated graphics pipeline. We present a numerical technique, homomorphic factorization, that can decompose arbitrary BRDFs into products of two or more factors of lower dimensionality, each factor dependent on a different interpolated geometric parameter. Compared to an earlier factorization technique based on the singular value decomposition, this new technique generates a factorization with only positive factors (which makes it more suitable for current graphics hardware accelerators), provides control over the smoothness of the result, minimizes relative rather than absolute error, and can deal with scattered, sparse data without a separate resampling and interpolation algorithm.

The molecular mechanisms responsible for the development of proteinuria and glomerulosclerosis in radiation nephropathy remain largely unknown. Podocytes are increasingly recognized as key players in the pathogenesis of proteinuria in primary and secondary glomerular disorders. The lipid-modulating enzyme sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase acid-like 3B (SMPDL3b) is a key determinant of podocyte injury and a known off target of the anti-CD20 antibody rituximab (RTX). The current study investigates the role of sphingolipids in radiation-induced podocytopathy. After a single dose of radiation (8 Gy), several ceramide species were significantly elevated. In particular, C16:00, C24:00, and C24:1 ceramides were the most abundant ceramide species detected. These changes were paralleled by a time-dependent drop in SMPDL3b protein, sphingosine, and sphingosine-1-phosphate levels. Interestingly, SMPDL3b-overexpressing podocytes had higher basal levels of sphingosine-1-phosphate and maintained basal ceramide levels after irradiation. Morphologically, irradiated podocytes demonstrated loss of filopodia and remodeling of cortical actin. Furthermore, the actin binding protein ezrin relocated from the plasma membrane to the cytosol as early as 2 h after radiation. In contrast, SMPDL3b overexpressing podocytes were protected from radiation-induced cytoskeletal remodeling. Treatment with RTX before radiation exposure partially protected podocytes from SMPDL3b loss, cytoskeletal remodeling, and caspase 3 cleavage. Our results demonstrate that radiation injury induces early cytoskeletal remodeling, down-regulation of SMPDL3b, and elevation of cellular ceramide levels. Overexpression of SMPDL3b and pretreatment with RTX confer a radioprotective effect in cultured podocytes. These findings indicate a potential role for SMPDL3b and RTX in radiation-induced podocytopathy.-Ahmad, A., Mitrofanova, A., Bielawski, J., Yang, Y., Marples, B., Fornoni, A., Zeidan, Y. H. Sphingomyelinase-like phosphodiesterase 3b mediates radiation-induced damage of renal podocytes.