Mycetoma is a chronic granulomatous, suppurative and progressive inflammatory disease that usually involves the subcutaneous tissue and bones after traumatic inoculation of the causative organism. In India, actinomycotic mycetoma is prevalent in south India, south-east Rajasthan and Chandigarh, while eumycetoma, which constitutes one third of the total cases, is mainly reported from north India and central Rajasthan. The objective was to determine the epidemiological profile and spectrum of eumycetoma from a tertiary care hospital in Delhi, North India. Thirty cases of eumycetoma were diagnosed by conventional methods of direct microscopy, culture and species-specific sequencing as per standard protocol. The spectrum of fungal pathogens included Exophiala jeanselmei, Madurella mycetomatis, Fusarium solani, Sarocladium kiliense, Acremonium blochii, Aspergillus nidulans, Fusarium incarnatum, Scedosporium apiospermum complex, Curvularia lunata and Medicopsis romeroi. Eumycetoma can be treated with antifungal therapy and needs to be combined with surgery. It has good prognosis if it is timely diagnosed and the correct species identified by culture for targeted therapy of these patients. Black moulds required prolonged therapy. Its low reporting and lack of familiarity may predispose patients to misdiagnosis and consequently delayed treatment. Hence health education and awareness campaign on the national and international level in the mycetoma belt is crucial.

Melatonin-rich and 1,8-cineole-rich extracts have been successfully obtained from yellow mustard (YM) and small cardamom (SC) seeds, respectively, employing green technology of supercritical CO2 (SC-CO2) extraction. Chemical profiling confirmed the presence of melatonin and 1,8-cineole and co-extractants in the respective extracts. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy attested strong antioxidant activities of the extracts foregoing pan-assay interference compounds involved in spectroscopic analysis. These extracts also exhibited synergistic efficacies greater than unity confirming antioxidant synergy among the co-extracted bioactives therein. To ascertain hypocholesterolaemic efficacies, these extracts were co-administered orally with Triton X (at the pre-optimised dose of 175 mg/kg body weight (BW)) to Wistar albino rats at doses of 550, 175 and 55 mg/kg BW. Serum total cholesterol levels in the rats were monitored on days 3, 7, 15 and 21. On day 21, total cholesterol level reduced appreciably by 49·44 % in rats treated with YM seed extract and by 48·95 % in rats treated with SC seed extract, comparable with atorvastatin-administered rats (51·09 %). Either extract demonstrated inhibitory effects on hepatic 3-hydroxy-3-methyl-glutaryl-CoA (HMG-CoA) reductase activity. A molecular docking exercise identified specific compounds in the extracts which possessed binding affinities comparable with therapeutically used HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors. In silico and in vivo studies concertedly concluded that the consortium of bioactive components in the extracts cannot be considered as invalid metabolic panaceas and therefore these ‘green’ extracts could be safely subjected to clinical studies as preventive biotherapeutics for hypercholesterolaemia. These extracts could be consumed per se as hypocholesterolaemic supplements or could be ingredients of new spice-based therapeutic foods.

In today's highly competitive market, product success is determined by two critical factors - innovation and sustainability. While innovation looks to rampantly satisfy the consumers' ever growing requirements with creative solutions, sustainability attempts to rationalise the precarious demands of desired requirements on economy, society and environment.

InDeaTe - Innovation Design database and Template, a web-based, design process guidance tool, supports design of sustainable systems by incorporating sustainability requirements into the design process. This paper investigates the potential of the tool to improve the usefulness of a design, one of the indicators of the creativity of the solutions, apart from its novelty. Comparative studies are conducted to assess the improvement of ‘requirement-satisfaction’,a proxy measure for usefulness. Upon introduction of the tool into the design process, significant improvements are reported, thereby reflecting the ability of InDeaTe to increase the usefulness of solutions and foster creativity in design.

Endoperoxides kill malaria parasites via cleavage of their endoperoxide bridge by haem or iron, leading to generation of cytotoxic oxygen-centred radicals. In view of the Leishmania parasites having a relatively compromised anti-oxidant defense and high iron content, this study aims to establish the underlying mechanism(s) accounting for the apoptotic-like death of Leishmania promastigotes by artemisinin, an endoperoxide. The formation of reactive oxygen species was confirmed by flow cytometry and was accompanied by inhibition of mitochondrial complexes I–III and II–III. However, this did not translate into a generation of mitochondrial superoxide or decrease in oxygen consumption, indicating minimal impairment of the electron transport chain. Artemisinin caused depolarization of the mitochondrial membrane along with a substantial depletion of adenosine triphosphatase (ATP), but it was not accompanied by enhancement of ATP hydrolysis. Collectively, the endoperoxide-mediated radical formation by artemisinin in Leishmania promastigotes was the key step for triggering its antileishmanial activity, leading secondarily to mitochondrial dysfunction indicating that endoperoxides represent a promising therapeutic strategy against Leishmania worthy of pharmacological consideration.

The biological domain has the potential to offer a rich source of analogies to solve engineering design problems. However, due to the complexity embedded in biological systems, adding to the lack of structured, detailed, and searchable knowledge bases, engineering designers find it hard to access the knowledge in the biological domain, which therefore poses challenges in understanding the biological concepts in order to apply these concepts to engineering design problems. In order to assist the engineering designers in problem-solving, we report, in this paper, a web-based tool called Idea-Inspire 4.0 that supports analogical design using two broad features. First, the tool provides access to a number of biological systems using a searchable knowledge base. Second, it explains each one of these biological systems using a multi-modal representation: that is, using function decomposition model, text, function model, image, video, and audio. In this paper, we report two experiments that test how well the multi-modal representation in Idea-Inspire 4.0 supports understanding and application of biological concepts in engineering design problems. In one experiment, we use Bloom's method to test “analysis” and “synthesis” levels of understanding of a biological system. In the next experiment, we provide an engineering design problem along with a biological-analogous system and examine the novelty and requirement-satisfaction (two major indicators of creativity) of resulting design solutions. In both the experiments, the biological system (analogue) was provided using Idea-Inspire 4.0 as well as using a conventional text-image representation so that the efficacy of Idea-Inspire 4.0 is tested using a benchmark.

It is well-known that creativity is crucial for sustaining a product against competition. Many factors have been proposed in the literature as indicators of creativity, among which outcome-characteristics-based factors are considered the most reliable; among these, the creativity of an outcome is often indicated by two major factors: novelty and usefulness. Only a few studies address as to how creativity assessment methods and their results can be used during the design process. To systematically address the issue of how to influence creativity of design solutions, the following questions have been framed. (1) Which factors should be used as indicators of creativity consistently across different phases of the engineering design process? (2) How can creativity be assessed in terms of these factors during the engineering design process? In this work, we consider novelty and usefulness as the necessary factors for creativity. It is found, however, that it is not possible to directly assess the usefulness of outcomes during the design process. Therefore, requirement satisfaction is used as a proxy for usefulness. We propose a creativity assessment method that uses novelty and requirement satisfaction as indicators for creativity; the method can be used for assessing not only complete products but also ideas or concepts, as they evolve through the phases of the design process. The application of the method in design is explained using a detailed example from a case study.