Abstract : The Thymus vulgaris extracts are effective as anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, antioxidant, antibacterial and antifungal. E. coli is a major pathogen involved in nosocomial infections and one of multi-drug resistance organisms. UTI is the most common extraintestinal E. coli infections and is caused by uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC). This study aimed to prove the Thymus vulgaris ethanol extract effect in increasing IL-10 and decreasing TNF-α and bacterial colonies in the urinary bladder. All Thymus vulgaris parts, which bought from Gharian-Libya, were dried, then macerated 3 times, and its ethanol was evaporated. Final extraction results were stored in the freezer. This study use 20 female mice divided into 5 groups; (1) positive control (infected with E. coli); (2) negative control (without infection); and treatment groups T1, T2, T3 (infected mice administrated with ethanol extract of Thymus vulgaris (ETV) 250, 500, 750 mg/kg B.wt). The bacterial colonies in urinary bladder were analyzed; the blood levels of TNF-α, IL-10 were analyzed by ELISA method. There was no visible E. coli colonies infection in urinary bladder in all treated groups. ETV increased the IL-10 and decrease TNF-α level in blood. Keywords: Thymus vulgaris, TNF-α, IL-10, Escherichia coli, in vivo.. 

Abstract—Early detection of malignant melanoma skin cancer is crucial for treating the disease and saving lives. Many computerized techniques have been reported in the literature to diagnose and classify the disease with satisfactory skin cancer detection performance. However, reducing the false detection rate is still challenging and preoccupying because false positives trigger the alarm and require intervention by an expert pathologist for further examination and screening. In this paper, an automatic skin cancer diagno- sis system that combines different textural and color features is proposed. New textural and color features are used in a bag-of-features approach for efficient and accurate detection. We particularly claim that the Histogram of Gradients (HG) and the Histogram of Lines (HL) are more suitable for the analysis and clas- sification of dermoscopic and standard skin images than the conventional Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and the Histogram of Oriented Lines (HOL), respectively. The HG and HL are bagged separately us- ing a codebook for each and then combined with other bagged color vector angles and Zernike moments to exploit the color information. The overall system has been assessed through intensive experiments using different classifiers on a dermoscopic image dataset and another standard dataset. Experimental results have shown the superiority of the proposed system over state-of-the-art techniques.

Leishmania pyrimidine salvage is replete with opportunities for therapeutic intervention with enzyme inhibitors or antimetabolites. Their uptake into cells depends upon specific transporters; therefore it is essential to establish whether various Leishmania species possess similar pyrimidine transporters capable of drug uptake. Here, we report a comprehensive characterization of pyrimidine transport in L. major and L. mexicana. In both species, two transporters for uridine/adenosine were detected, one of which also transported uracil and the antimetabolites 5-fluoruracil (5-FU) and 5F,2'deoxyuridine (5F,2'dUrd), and was designated uridine-uracil transporter 1 (UUT1); the other transporter mediated uptake of adenosine, uridine, 5F,2'dUrd and thymidine and was designated Nucleoside Transporter 1 (NT1). To verify the reported L. donovani model of two NT1-like genes encoding uridine/adenosine transporters, and an NT2 gene encoding an inosine transporter, we cloned the corresponding L. major and L. mexicana genes, expressing each in T. brucei. Consistent with the L. donovani reports, the NT1-like genes of either species mediated the adenosine-sensitive uptake of [3H]-uridine but not of [3H]-inosine. Conversely, the NT2-like genes mediated uptake of [3H]-inosine but not [3H]-uridine. Among pyrimidine antimetabolites tested, 5-FU and 5F,2'dUrd were the most effective antileishmanials; resistance to both analogs was induced in L. major and L. mexicana. In each case it was found that the resistant cells had lost the transport capacity for the inducing drug. Metabolomics analysis found that the mechanism of action of 5-FU and 5F-2'dUrd was similar in both Leishmania species, with major changes in deoxynucleotide metabolism. We conclude that the pyrimidine salvage system is highly conserved in Leishmania species - essential information for the development of pyrimidine-based chemotherapy.

Te output feedback eigenvalue assignment problem for discrete-time systems is considered. Te problem is formulated frst as

an unconstrained minimization problem, where a three-term nonlinear conjugate gradient method is proposed to fnd a local

solution. In addition, a cut to the objective function is included, yielding an inequality constrained minimization problem, where a

logarithmic barrier method is proposed for fnding the local solution. Te conjugate gradient method is further extended to tackle

the eigenvalue assignment problem for the two cases of decentralized control systems and control systems with time delay. Te

performance of the methods is illustrated through various test examples.