Newly, the usage of nanofibers (NFs) as wound dressings with the aim of their rapid healing and prevention of bacterial infection has been considered by researchers. In this regard, we produced the ethylcellulose/hydroxypropyl methylcellulose NFs incorporated with Aloe-vera (EC/HPMC/Alv) by the electrospinning technique. The produced NFs were investigated for their chemical structure, morphological, mechanical, thermal stability, degradation, swelling, cell viability, and antibacterial properties. Amongst the produced NFs, the NF samples containing 10% Alv illustrated the appropriate thermal stability and tensile properties. The produced NFs did not show any cell cytotoxicity which indicates their good compatibility. Also, NFs containing Alv significantly (P<0.05) increased cell proliferation and adhesion. In addition, the NFs/Alv sample was indicated antibacterial ability against S. aureus (10.21 ± 1.21 mm) and E. coli (5.06 ± 1.3 mm) pathogenic bacteria. As a result, these findings suggest that the produced NFs could be applied as an active mat for wound dressing application.

Background: Sea anemones are toxic sedentary invertebrates that are often present in the intertidal zone. Objectives: In this study, cytotoxic effects of the crude extract and its fractions from the oral disk of Stichodactyla haddoni on breast cancer cell line MCF-7 were investigated. Methods: Samples were collected from the intertidal zone in the Persian Gulf. Phosphate buffer saline (PBS) and Millipore filters were used to prepare the crude extract and its fractions, respectively. MCF-7 cells were exposed to the crude extract or one of its five fractions, (with molecular weights < 3 kDa to > 100 kDa) at concentrations of 200 to 1400 µg/mL for 24 to 48 hours.Results: All treatments inhibited the growth of MCF-7 cancer cells. The highest inhibitory effect belonged to fractions 2 and 5, with 85 and 81.3% lethality, respectively. These fractions with the concentration of 1200 and 1400 µg/mL had the most anticancer effects against MCF-7. Conclusions:The 1200 µg/mL concentration of fraction 5 containing peptides < 3 kDa is recommended for separation and purification of its components for pharmacological studies to control breast cancer.

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In this paper, a systems is presented to recognize static gesture of alphabets in Persian Sign Language (PSL). The implemented system does not need any gloves or visual marking system, and just uses images captured by camera to recognize PSL alphabets. This system contains three principal phase: preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. Preprocessing phase includes using several preprocessing methods on the image which reduces the difference among the hand gesture in the same letter group. In the second phase, Hough Transform function is used for feature extraction from images and MLP NN is used for image classification in the third phase. Results of the paper show that in spite of applying several preprocessing methods on images, the time of neural network training is reduced. Furthermore the recognition rate of PLS improves considerably. This system is able to recognize every 37 PSL alphabet by 98.91% accuracy.