SummaryDevelopment of an effective immunoprophylactic agent for visceral leishmaniasis (VL) has become imperative due to the increasing number of cases of drug resistance and relapse. Live and killed whole parasites as well as fractionated and recombinant preparations have been evaluated for vaccine potential. However, a successful vaccine against the disease has been elusive. Because protective immunity in human and experimental leishmaniasis is predominantly of the Th1 type, immunogens with Th1 stimulatory potential would make good vaccine candidates. In the present study, the integral membrane proteins (IMPs) and non-membranous soluble proteins (NSPs), purified from promastigotes of a recent field isolate, Leishmania donovani stain 2001, were evaluated for their ability to induce cellular responses in cured patients ( n = = = = 9), endemic controls ( n = = = = 5) of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) and treated hamsters ( n = = = = 10). IMPs and NSPs induced significant proliferative responses (SI 6·3 ± ± ± ± 4·1 and 5·6 ± ± ± ± 2·3, respectively; P < < < < 0·01) and IFN-g g g g production (356·3 ± ± ± ± 213·4 and 294·29 ± ± ± ± 107·6 pg/ml, respectively) in lymphocytes isolated from cured VL patients. Significant lymphoproliferative responses against IMPs and NSPs were also noticed in cured Leishmania animals (SI 7·2 ± ± ± ± 4·7 & 6·4 ± ± ± ± 4·1, respectively; P < < < < 0·01). In addition, significant NO production in response both IMPs and NSPs was also noticed in macrophages of hamsters and different cell lines (J774A-1 and THP1). These results suggest that protective, immunostimulatory molecules are present in the IMP and NSP fractions, which may be exploited for development of a subunit vaccine for VL.

Smartphones are the most popular and widespread personal devices. Apart from their conventional use, that is, calling and texting, they have also been used to perform multiple security sensitive activities, such as online banking and shopping, social networking, taking pictures, and e-mailing. On a positive side, smartphones have improved the quality of life by providing multiple services that users desire, for example, anytime-anywhere computing. However, on the other side, they also pose security and privacy threats to the users' stored data. User authentication is the first line of defense to prevent unauthorized access to the smartphone. Several authentication schemes have been proposed over the years; however, their presentation might be perplexing to the new researchers to this domain, under the shade of several buzzwords, for example, active, continuous, implicit, static, and transparent, being introduced in academic papers without comprehensive description. Moreover, most of the reported authentication solutions were evaluated mainly in terms of accuracy, overlooking a very important aspect-the usability. is paper surveys various types and ways of authentication, designed and developed primarily to secure the access to smartphones and attempts to clarify correlated buzzwords, with the motivation to assist new researchers in understanding the gist behind those concepts. We also present the assessment of existing user authentication schemes exhibiting their security and usability issues.

Purely aqueous-phase chemoselective reduction of a wide range of aromatic and aliphatic nitro substrates has been performed in the presence of inexpensive Ni- and Co-based nanoparticle catalysts using hydrazine hydrate as a reducing agent at room temperature. Along with the observed high conversions and selectivities, the studied nanoparticle catalysts also exhibit a high tolerance to other highly reducible groups present in the nitro substrates. The development of these potential chemoselective reduction catalysts also provides a facile route for the synthesis of other industrially important fine chemicals or biologically important compounds, where other highly reducible groups are present in close proximity to the targeted nitro groups.

Prophylactic interventions such as vaccine allocation are some of the most effective public health policy planning tools. The supply of vaccines, however, is limited and an important challenge is to optimally allocate the vaccines to minimize epidemic impact. This resource allocation question (which we refer to as VaccIntDesign) has multiple dimensions: when, where, to whom, etc. Most of the existing literature in this topic deals with the latter (to whom), proposing policies that prioritize individuals by age and disease risk. However, since seasonal influenza spread has a typical spatial trend, and due to the temporal constraints enforced by the availability schedule, the when and where problems become equally, if not more, relevant. In this paper, we study the VaccIntDesign problem in the context of seasonal influenza spread in the United States. We develop a national scale metapopulation model for influenza that integrates both short and long distance human mobility, along with realistic data on vaccine uptake. We also design GreedyAlloc, a greedy algorithm for allocating the vaccine supply at the state level under temporal constraints and show that such a strategy improves over the current baseline of pro-rata allocation, and the improvement is more pronounced for higher vaccine efficacy and moderate flu season intensity. Further, the resulting strategy resembles a ring vaccination applied spatiallyacross the US.