Annamalai University

About: Annamalai University is a education organization based out in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Lipid peroxidation & Antioxidant. The organization has 8098 authors who have published 10758 publications receiving 203872 citations.

Biosurfactant production by Azotobacter chroococcum isolated from the marine environment

Abstract: Preliminary characterization of a biosurfactant-producing Azotobacter chroococcum isolated from marine environment showed maximum biomass and biosurfactant production at 120 and 132 h, respectively, at pH 8.0, 38°C, and 30‰ salinity utilizing a 2% carbon substrate. It grew and produced biosurfactant on crude oil, waste motor lubricant oil, and peanut oil cake. Peanut oil cake gave the highest biosurfactant production (4.6 mg/mL) under fermentation conditions. The biosurfactant product emulsified waste motor lubricant oil, crude oil, diesel, kerosene, naphthalene, anthracene, and xylene. Preliminary characterization of the biosurfactant using biochemical, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and mass spectral analysis indicated that the biosurfactant was a lipopeptide with percentage lipid and protein proportion of 31.3:68.7.

Antihyperglycemic effect of protocatechuic acid on streptozotocin-diabetic rats.

Abstract: Protocatechuic acid (PCA) (3,4-dihydroxybenzoic acid), a natural phenolic compound found in many edible and medicinal plants, is a major benzoic acid derivative with a strong antioxidative effect, 10-fold higher than that of alpha-tocopherol. The present study is aimed at evaluating the antidiabetic effect of PCA on STZ-diabetic rats. Diabetes was induced in male albino Wistar rats by the administration of STZ (40 mg/kg BW, i.p.). PCA was administered orally at three different doses (50, 100, 200 mg/kg BW/day) to STZ-diabetic rats for 45 days. Diabetic rats showed increase in plasma glucose and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and a decrease in plasma insulin and hemoglobin (Hb). The activities of gluconeogenic enzymes like glucose 6-phosphatase and fructose 1,6-bisphosphatase increased whereas the glycolytic enzyme glucokinase decreased in the liver along with glycogen content. The oral administration of PCA or glibenclamide in saline, for 45 days, prevented the changes and improved toward normalcy. No significant effect was observed in normal rats treated with PCA. Thus, our results show that PCA at 100 mg possesses a potential antihyperglycemic effect that is comparable with glibenclamide.

Automatic classification of Tamil documents using vector space model and artificial neural network

Abstract: Automatic text classification based on vector space model (VSM), artificial neural networks (ANN), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naives Bayes (NB) and support vector machine (SVM) have been applied on English language documents, and gained popularity among text mining and information retrieval (IR) researchers. This paper proposes the application of VSM and ANN for the classification of Tamil language documents. Tamil is morphologically rich Dravidian classical language. The development of internet led to an exponential increase in the amount of electronic documents not only in English but also other regional languages. The automatic classification of Tamil documents has not been explored in detail so far. In this paper, corpus is used to construct and test the VSM and ANN models. Methods of document representation, assigning weights that reflect the importance of each term are discussed. In a traditional word-matching based categorization system, the most popular document representation is VSM. This method needs a high dimensional space to represent the documents. The ANN classifier requires smaller number of features. The experimental results show that ANN model achieves 93.33% which is better than the performance of VSM which yields 90.33% on Tamil document classification.

Investigation of the radioprotective efficacy of hesperidin against gamma-radiation induced cellular damage in cultured human peripheral blood lymphocytes.

Abstract: The present study was aimed to evaluate the radioprotective efficacy of hesperidin (HN), a flavonone glycoside against gamma-radiation-induced cellular damage in cultured human peripheral blood lymphocytes Different concentrations of HN (327, 655, 983, 1310, 1638 and 1965 microM) were pre-incubated with lymphocytes for 30 min prior to gamma-irradiation [4 Gy] and the micronuclei (MN) scoring, dicentric aberration and comet assay were performed to fix the effective dose of HN against gamma-irradiation induced cellular damage The results indicated that among all the concentrations, 1638 microM concentration of HN showed optimum protection by effectively decreasing the MN frequencies, dicentric aberrations and comet attributes Based on the above results, 1638 microM concentration of HN was fixed as the effective dose to further investigate its radioprotective efficacy which was then carried out by pre-incubating lymphocytes with 1638 microM concentration of HN, exposing the lymphocytes to different doses (1, 2, 3 and 4 Gy) of radiation and investigating radiation induced genetic damage (MN, dicentric aberration, comet assay, DNA fragmentation assay) and biochemical changes (changes in the level of enzymic and non-enzymic antioxidants, lipid peroxidation) The results indicated a dose dependent increase in both genetic damage and thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS), accompanied by a significant decrease in the antioxidant status compared to HN treated groups which modulated the toxic effects through its antioxidant potential Thus the current study shows HN to be an effective radioprotector against gamma-radiation induced in-vitro cellular damage in lymphocytes