A new technique for the measurement of 3D crystal morphology and identification of its polymorph using tomographic images is proposed. Confocal microscopy is used for the first time to obtain tomographic images of crystals that are coated with a suitable fluorescent dye. A convex polyhedron is fitted through a stack of tomographic images of a crystal to obtain the normal vectors of each facet and their corresponding perpendicular distances from the center of the crystal. The angular patterns are generated from the measured normal vectors and are matched with the master angular patterns of each polymorph. It is shown that the matching of the angular patterns is unique and provides a simpler way to identify polymorphs. An image-analysis program that can be integrated with conventional confocal microscopes was created to sequentially perform image processing, morphology measurement, and polymorph detection. This program was used to measure morphologies and identify polymorphs of 2D and 3D acetaminophen crystals. Detailed directions are provided to enable the application of the methodology without the need for special-purpose software. The image-analysis program is also suitable for repeated measurements to produce morphology distributions. This technique will provide an effective platform for measuring the 3D shapes of materials of interest to many applications.

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Oral cancer is of major public health problem in India. Current investigation was aimed to identify the specific deregulated miRNAs which are responsible for development of resistance phenotype through regulating their resistance related target gene expression in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Cisplatin-resistant OSCC cell lines were developed from their parental human OSCC cell lines and subsequently characterised. The resistant cells exhibited enhanced proliferative, clonogenic capacity with significant up-regulation of P-glycoprotein (ABCB1), c-Myc, survivin, β-catenin and a putative cancer-stem-like signature with increased expression of CD44, whereas the loss of E-cadherin signifies induced EMT phenotype. A comparative analysis of miRNA expression profiling in parental and cisplatin-resistant OSCC cell lines for a selected sets (deregulated miRNAs in head and neck cancer) revealed resistance specific signature. Moreover, we observed similar expression pattern for these resistance specific signature miRNAs in neoadjuvant chemotherapy treated and recurrent tumours compared to those with newly diagnosed primary tumours in patients with OSCC. All these results revealed that these miRNAs play an important role in the development of cisplatin-resistance mainly through modulating cancer stem-cell-like and EMT-type properties in OSCC.

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