Sharif Digital Repository

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate the neurotoxic effects of Fe3O4 magnetic- CurNPs on isolated schizophrenia mitochondria of rats as an in vivo model. Methods: We designed CMN loaded superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs) (Fe3O4 magnetic- CurNPs) to achieve an enhanced therapeutic effect. The physicochemical properties of Fe3O4 magnetic- CurNPs were characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD), and dynamic laser light scattering (DLS) and zeta potential. Further, to prove Fe3O4 magnetic- CurNPs results in superior therapeutic effects, and also, the mitochondrial membrane potential collapse, mitochondrial complex II activity, reactive oxygen species generation,... 

At room temperature, ZrOCl2·8H2O on montmorillonite K10 efficiently catalyzes conjugate addition of amines to a variety of conjugated alkenes such as α,β-unsaturated carbonyl compounds, carboxylic esters, nitriles and amides under solvent-free conditions. The catalyst can be recycled for subsequent reactions without any appreciable loss of efficiency. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved  

A Zn-Rich (GaN)1−x(ZnO)xnanostructure was synthesized with the assistance of a high-gravity technique in order to reduce the reaction time and temperature. The synthesized inorganic nanomaterial has been applied in both drug and gene delivery systems, and as the first fully inorganic nanomaterial, it was investigated in a comprehensive cellular investigation as well. In order to increase the potential bioavailability, as well as the interactions with the pCRISPR, the nanomaterial was enriched with additional Zn ions. The nanomaterial and the final nanocarrier were characterized at each step before and after any biological analysisviaFESEM, AFM, TEM, FTIR and XRD. The polymer coated... 

A double-tube vapor phase transport system has been used to grow ZnO nanostructures. Nanopillars, nanorods and nanowires of zinc oxide were synthesized on Au nanoparticle catalyst depending on source-substrate distance and temperature gradient in the quartz tube. In addition, influence of growth time and substrate temperature on the morphology of the nanorods and nanowires were also investigated. The scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) were employed to further understand the nanostructures growth mechanism on various temperatures and growth time steps. Longer length (>4μm) with hexagonal-cross-sectional nanowires, in [002]... 

A label-free electrochemical biosensor was developed for the rapid detection of the matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9) biomarker on the basis of antibody immobilizing on the zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticle and ZnO nanorod electrodes. The charge transfer resistance (Rct) of the electrodes was used as the indicator for MMP-9 concentration, which was obtained through cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The ZnO nanorod-based biosensor exhibited linear behavior in the MMP-9 concentration range of 1–1000 ng/ml, which is a wider range than the available concentration ranges for most of the conventional methods. The biosensor sensitivity was 32.5 μA/(decade × cm2)... 

Background: Nutrigenomic has revolutionized our understanding of nutrition. As plants make up a noticeable part of our diet, in the present study we chose microRNAs of edible plants and investigated if they can perfectly match human genes, indicating potential regulatory functionalities. Methods: miRNAs were obtained using the PNRD database. Edible plants were separated and microRNAs in common in at least four of them entered our analysis. Using vmatchPattern, these 64 miRNAs went through four steps of refinement to improve target prediction: Alignment with the whole genome (2581 results), filtered for those in gene regions (1371 results), filtered for exon regions (66 results) and finally... 

Glioma is a common type of tumor that develops in the brain. Due to many differences in the shape and appearance, accurate segmentation of glioma for identifying all parts of the tumor and its surrounding tissues in cancer detection is a challenging task in cancer detection. In recent researches, the combination of atlas-based segmentation and machine learning methods have presented superior performance over other automatic brain MRI segmentation algorithms. To overcome the side effects of limited existing information on atlas-based segmentation, and the long training and the time consuming phase of learning methods, we proposed a semi-supervised learning framework by introducing a... 

There are increasing evidences that adjusting the chemistry of the injecting water improves the oil recovery efficiency. However, the underlying mechanisms for this technique which is referred to as "smart waterflood" have not yet been thoroughly understood. It is needed to explore the role of individual ions through set of different tests, to find the right mechanisms behind "smart waterflood". This study is focused on the fluid/solid (carbonate) interactions through systematic wettability measurement. Contact angle measurements accompanied by spontaneous imbibition tests were employed to determine the role of individual monovalent and divalent ions in wettability alteration process by... 

In this research, adsorption and photocatalytic degradation process were utilized to remove organic dye from wastewater. To accomplish that, a newly-designed ternary nanostructure based on Ag nanoparticles/ZnO nanorods/three-dimensional graphene network (Ag NPs/ZnO NRs/3DG) was prepared using a combined hydrothermal-photodeposition method. The three-dimensional structure of graphene hydrogel as a support for growth of ZnO nanorods was characterized using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). In addition, diameter of silver nanoparticles grown on the ZnO nanorods with the average aspect ratio of 5 was determined in the range of 30–80 nm by using transmission electron microscopy... 

A new plasmonic Ag hybridized CuWO4/WO3 heterostructure was successfully synthesized via a ligand-assisted sol gel method. The as-prepared plasmonic nanohybrid was thoroughly characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), UV-visible spectroscopy, photoluminescence (PL) spectrometry, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area analysis and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). Moreover, the photocatalytic activity was evaluated by photo-degradation of methylene blue (MB) under visible light irradiation. The results indicate that the as-prepared plasmonic Ag-CuWO4/WO3 nanohybrid (compared to pure... 

A molecular structural mechanics method has been implemented to investigate the vibrational behavior of single-layered graphene sheets. By adopting this approach, mode shapes and natural frequencies are obtained. Vibrational analysis is performed with different chirality and boundary conditions. Numerical results from the atomistic modeling are employed to develop predictive equations via a statistical nonlinear regression model. With the proposed equations, fundamental frequencies of single-layered graphene sheets with considered boundary conditions can be predicted within 3% difference with respect to the atomistic simulation. © IOP Publishing Ltd  

A highly swelling nanoporous hydrogel (NPH) was synthesized via UV-irradiation graft copolymerization of acrylic acid (AA) onto salep backbone and its application as a carrier matrix for colonic delivery of tetracycline hydrochloride (TH) was investigated. Optimized synthesis of the hydrogel was performed by the classic method. The swelling behavior of optimum hydrogel was measured in different media. The hydrogel formation was confirmed by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA/DTG/DTA). The study of the surface morphology of hydrogels using SEM showed a nanoporous (average pore size: about 350 nm) structure for the sample obtained under... 

The quantities of residues of some triazines such as prometon, propazine, atrazine and simazine in complex matrices of apple samples were determined, using gas chromatography-selected ion mass (GC-SIM) spectrometry. Generalized rank annihilation method (GRAM) as a second-order calibration technique was used for screening, resolving and finally determining the amounts of the residues. Before the GRAM analysis, different steps of data preprocessing such as background correction, de-skewing and standardization for rank alignment was used for every target analyte. The de-skewing and rank alignment algorithms were used for bilinearity and trilinearity corrections, respectively. The two data... 

The gas chromatography retention indices of 168 pesticides were used to construct a robust quantitative structure - retention relationship (QSRR) model. After outlier detection by Cook's influence measurement, the remaining compounds were subjected to two different modeling strategies. The first one was stepwise multiple linear regression (stepwise-MLR). Results of this method revealed that 81.7 percent of variances of the response could be explained by the model. The other strategy was kernel orthogonal projection to latent structure (KOPLS). R2 and RMSE values for the prediction set established by Monte Carlo cross validation of the KOPLS were 0.906 and 0.093, respectively. Y-randomization... 

Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry combined with iterative and non-iterative resolution methods was used to characterize the essential oil components of Iranian cumin and caraway. Orthogonal projection resolution (OPR) as a non-iterative and distance-selection-multivariate curve resolution-alternative least squares (DS-MCR-ALS) as an iterative method were used as auxiliary means to the analysis in the case of overlapping peaks. A total of 19 and 39 components were identified by direct similarity searches for cumin and caraway oils, respectively. These numbers were extended to 49 and 98 components, respectively with the help of chemometric techniques. Major constituents in cumin are... 

Most of 200 Activated Sludge Plant in Iran are overloaded and as a result, their efficiency is low. In this work, a pilot plant is manufactured and put into operation in one of the wastewater treatment plants in the west of Tehran. Instead of conventional activated sludge, a membrane bioreactor and an upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor used as a pretreatment unit in this pilot. For the sake of data accuracy and precision, an enriched municipal wastewater was opted as an influent to the pilot. Based on the attained result, the optimum retention time in this system was 4. h, and the overall COD removal efficiency was 98%. As a whole, the application of this retrofit would increase the... 

The existing learning methods usually assume that training data and test data follow the same distribution, while this is not always true. Thus, in many cases the performance of these methods on the test data will be severely degraded. In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation, where no labeled data in the target domain is available. The proposed method first finds a new representation for both the source and the target domain and then learns a prediction function for the classifier by optimizing an objective function which simultaneously tries to minimize the loss function on the source domain while also maximizes the consistency of manifold (which is based on... 

Water-quality modeling and prediction is a complicated task because of inherent randomness and uncertainties associated with various processes and variables throughout the stream environment and the lack of appropriate data. Hence, the results of mathematical models are always approximate, lying within an uncertainty. This paper describes and demonstrates the application of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's water-quality model, QUAL2E-UNCAS, to the Zayandeh-Rood River in Iran. First-order reliability analysis is used to examine the variability of predicted water-quality parameters of total dissolved solids, dissolved oxygen, and biochemical oxygen demand. This analysis also... 

The ability to predict the cellular dynamics of intracellular transport has enormous potential to impact human health. A key transporter is kinesin-1, an ATP-driven molecular motor that shuttles cellular cargos along microtubules (MTs). The dynamics of kinesins depends critically on their unbinding rate from MT, which varies depending on the force direction applied on the motor, i.e. the force-unbinding rate relation is asymmetric. However, it remains unclear how changing the force direction from resisting (applied against the motion direction) to assisting (applied in the motion direction) alters the kinesin's unbinding and stepping. Here, we propose a theoretical model for the influence of... 

The present study has reported an optimized fabrication and application of a novel PVA/TEOS/Schiff base nanofibers membrane as a highly sensitive copper (II) ions in aqueous environment. Here in, for first time, an ultrasound-assisted synthesized symmetric Schiff base has been immobilized on a hybrid polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and TEOS using electrospinning technique for detection and filtration of copper ions. For this purpose, various working parameters were evaluated and finally the optimized nano fibers membrane was synthesized with 72 nm thickness and PVA/TEOS/Schiff base ratio of (wt%) 8:6:1. The optimized sample named PTLNFM has been employed successfully as an ultra sensitive...