Background: Legionella pneumophila (L. pneumophila) is gram-negative bacterium, which causes Legionnaires’ disease as well as Pontiac fever. Objective: To determine the frequency of Legionella pneumophila in pneumonic patients, to determine the clinical utility of diagnosing Legionella pneumonia by urinary antigen testing (LPUAT) in terms of sensitivity and specificity, to compares the results obtained from patients by urinary antigen test with q Real Time PCR (RT PCR) using serum samples and to determine the frequency of serogroup 1 and other serogroups of L. pneumophila. Methods: A total of 100 pneumonic patients (community acquired pneumonia) were enrolled in this study during a period between October 2016 to April 2017; 92 sam

Sphingolipids are key components of eukaryotic membranes, particularly the plasma membrane. The biosynthetic pathway for the formation of these lipid species is largely conserved. However, in contrast to mammals, which produce sphingomyelin, organisms such as the pathogenic fungi and protozoa synthesize inositol phosphorylceramide (IPC) as the primary phosphosphingolipid. The key step involves the reaction of ceramide and phosphatidylinositol catalysed by IPC synthase, an essential enzyme with no mammalian equivalent encoded by the AUR1 gene in yeast and recently identified functional orthologues in the pathogenic kinetoplastid protozoa. As such this enzyme represents a promising target for novel anti-fungal and anti-protozoal drugs. Given

Moderately, advanced national election technologies have improved political systems. As electronic voting (e-voting) systems advance, security threats like impersonation, ballot tampering, and result manipulation increase. These challenges are addressed through a review covering biometric authentication, watermarking, and blockchain technologies, each of which plays a crucial role in improving the security of e-voting systems. More precisely, the biometric authentication is being examined due to its ability in identify the voters and reducing the risks of impersonation. The study also explores the blockchain technology to decentralize the elections, enhance the transparency and ensure the prevention of any unauthorized alteration or

Due to the continuous development in society and the multiplicity of customers' desires and their keeping pace with this development and their search for the quality and durability of the commodity that provides them with the best performance and that meets their needs and desires, all this has led to the consideration of quality as one of the competitive advantages that many industrial companies compete for and which are of interest to customers and are looking for. The research problem showed that the Diyala State Company for Electrical Industries relies on some simple methods and personal experience to monitor the quality of products and does not adopt scientific methods and modern programs. The aim of this research is to desi

Adversity and psychosocial stress are involved in aging through the following pathways. psychological stress enhances the nerve system to secrete endocrine mediators (hormones). Mitochondrial respiration mediates energy production stimulated by binding to these hormones to their receptors. Energy produced by mitochondria accelerates metabolism and, in its turn, leads to increases in reactive oxygen species (ROS) of free radicals. Cellular stress and accumulation of damage can result from an excess of ROS. Accumulation of damage comprises damages in telomeric and nontelomeric DNA, in addition to mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA damage plays an important role in increasing the pathway of p53/p21. The expression of the PGC-1α gene is inhi

One of the significant stages in computer vision is image segmentation which is fundamental for different applications, for example, robot control and military target recognition, as well as image analysis of remote sensing applications. Studies have dealt with the process of improving the classification of all types of data, whether text or audio or images, one of the latest studies in which researchers have worked to build a simple, effective, and high-accuracy model capable of classifying emotions from speech data, while several studies dealt with improving textual grouping. In this study, we seek to improve the classification of image division using a novel approach depending on two methods used to segment the images. The first