Minia University

About: Minia University is a education organization based out in Minya, Egypt. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 4967 authors who have published 8986 publications receiving 108384 citations.

Molecular docking reveals the potential of Salvadora persica flavonoids to inhibit COVID-19 virus main protease

Abstract: In December 2019, an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) commenced in Wuhan, China and affected around 210 countries and territories in a matter of weeks. It has a phylogenetic similarity to SARS-CoV and it was named coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and caused severe acute respiratory syndrome that could lead to death. One of the promising therapeutic strategies for virus infection is the search for enzyme inhibitors among natural compounds using molecular docking in order to obtain products with minimal side effects. COVID-19 virus main protease plays a vital role in mediating viral transcription and replication, introducing it as an attractive antiviral agent target. Metabolic profiling of the aqueous extract of Salvadora persica L. (Salvadoraceae) aerial parts dereplicated eleven known flavonol glycosides using LC-HRESIMS. All the annotated flavonoids exhibited significant binding stability at the N3 binding site to different degrees, except isorhamnetin-3-O-β-D-glucopyranoside, when compared with the currently used COVID-19 main protease inhibitor, darunavir. Structural similarity between the identified flavonoids enabled the study of the relationship between their structure and interactions with the receptor in the N3 binding site of the COVID-19 main protease. The results indicate that the basic flavonol nucleus possesses activity itself. Moreover, the presence of a rutinose moiety at the 3 position of ring C and absence of an O-methyl group in ring B of the flavonol structure could increase the binding stability. This study provides a scientific basis for the health benefits of the regular use of S. persica as it leaches bioactive flavonoids in the aqueous saliva.

Swarming behaviour of salps algorithm for predicting chemical compound activities

Abstract: The increasing size of chemical search space of chemical compound databases and importance of similarity measurements to drug discovery are main factors in chem.-informatics research. This paper introduces a swarming behavior of salps algorithm for predicting chemical compound activities. The salp optimization algorithm is proposed for chemical descriptor selection with three initialization (small, mixed and large). The K-nearest neighbor (KNN) was utilized for the fitness function of salps swarm optimization algorithm (SSOA) to choose a small number of features and achieve high classification accuracy. Experimental results reveal the capability of SSA to find an optimal feature subset which maximizes the classification performance and minimizes the number of selected features. A set of assessment indicators are used to evaluate and compared with different algorithms inclduing particle swarm optimization (PSO), Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (GOA), Grey Wolf Optimizer(GWO), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Whale Optimization algorithm (WOA) using three initialization method and a superior accuracy was obtained with our proposed approach. Also, in comparison with other algorithms that used the same data, our approach has a higher performance using less number of features. The previous algorithms (GOA, GWO, PSO, SSA, SCA, WOA) are compared and three different methods are used to initialize the different optimization algorithms to ensure capability of the different optimizers to converge from different initial positions namely mixed initialization, small initialization, and large initialization.

Anticancer activity of biostabilized selenium nanorods synthesized by Streptomyces bikiniensis strain Ess_amA-1

Abstract: Selenium is an important component of human diet and a number of studies have declared its chemopreventive and therapeutic properties against cancer. However, very limited studies have been conducted about the properties of selenium nanostructured materials in comparison to other well-studied selenospecies. Here, we have shown that the anticancer property of biostabilized selenium nanorods (SeNrs) synthesized by applying a novel strain Ess_amA-1 of Streptomyces bikiniensis. The strain was grown aerobically with selenium dioxide and produced stable SeNrs with average particle size of 17 nm. The optical, structural, morphological, elemental, and functional characterizations of the SeNrs were carried out using techniques such as UV-vis spectrophotometry, transmission electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry, and Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometry, respectively. The MTT (3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide) assay revealed that the biosynthesized SeNrs induces cell death of Hep-G2 and MCF-7 human cancer cells. The lethal dose (LD50%) of SeNrs on Hep-G2 and MCF-7 cells was recorded at 75.96 μg/mL and 61.86 μg/mL, respectively. It can be concluded that S. bikiniensis strain Ess_amA-1 could be used as renewable bioresources of biosynthesis of anticancer SeNrs. A hypothetical mechanism for anticancer activity of SeNrs is also proposed.