Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii ) is considered a critical healthcare problem for patients in intensive care units due to its high ability to be multidrug-resistant to most commercially available antibiotics. The aim of this study is to develop a colorimetric assay to quantitatively detect the target DNA of A. baumannii based on unmodified gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) from different clinical samples (burns, surgical wounds, sputum, blood and urine). A total of thirty-six A. baumannii clinical isolates were collected from five Iraqi hospitals in Erbil and Mosul provinces within the period from September 2020 to January 2021. Bacterial isolation and biochemical identification of isolates were carried out followed by DNA extraction from 36 isolates and six negative ATCC strains (Salmonalle typhi, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Enterobacter aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aures) and only one positive control ATCC A. baumannii using Phenol/Chloroform method. AuNPs were synthesized using the citrate reduction method and examined by XDR, FTIR, UV-VIS, FE-SEM, and TEM. The optimized colorimetric assay was employed based on unmodified spherical AuNPs and PCR amplification of 16S rRNA intergenic spacer sequences (ITS) with species-specific DNA oligo-targeters. Detection and optimization of A. baumannii amplicons using unmodified AuNPs were performed based on species-specific DNA oligonucleotide. The AuNPs assay was able to colorimetrically detect and distinguish A. baumannii from other ATCC bacterial isolates. The turnaround time of this assay was about 3 hours, including sample preparation and amplification, to show (0.025-6 ngµl-1) as a detection limit of DNA concentration. The efficacy of colorimetric detection was proved to effectively diagnose A. baumannii isolates with high sensitivity, simplicity, and robustness to rapidly diagnose A. baumannii isolates from different clinical samples.
A new nano-sized NiMo/TiO2-γ-Al2O3 was prepared as a Hydrodesulphurization catalyst for Iraqi gas oil with sulfur content of 8980 ppm, supplied from Al-Dura Refinery. Sol-gel method was used to prepare TiO2- γ-Al2O3 nano catalyst support with 64% TiO2, 32% Al2O3, Ni-Mo/TiO-γ-Al2O3 catalyst was prepared under vacuum impregnation conditions to loading metals with percentage 3.8 wt.% and 14 wt.% for nickel and molybdenum respectively while the percentage for alumina, and titanium became 21.7, and 58.61 respectively. The synthesized TiO2- γ-Al2O3 nanocomposites and Ni-Mo /TiO2
... Show MoreBackground: As the development of zirconia crown using CAD/CAM technology, the usage of full zirconia crown is gradually increased. The aim of this in-vitro study was to evaluate and contrast the vertical marginal fit of single all-ceramic translucent zirconia crowns constructed from different brands translucent zirconia blanks. Materials and Methods: An acrylic resin model of a left maxillary premolar was prepared all around the tooth with (1 mm) depth and 3D scanning to get fifteen STL files, then distributed into three groups (Imes-icor, Whitepeaks and Dental direct), 3D scanning and milling machine by Imes-icor CAD/CAM devise. Marginal gaps along vertical planes were measured at four indentations at the (mid mesial, mid distal, mid bucc
... Show MoreA high sensitivity, low power and low cost sensor has been developed for photoplethysmography (PPG) measurement. The PPG principle was applied to follow the dilatation and contraction of skin blood vessels during the cardiac cycle. A standard light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been used as a light emitter and detector, and in order to reduce the space, cost and power, the classical analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs) replaced by the pulse-based signal conversion techniques. A general purpose microcontroller has been used for the implementation of measurement protocol. The proposed approach leads to better spectral sensitivity, increased resolution, reduction in cost, dimensions and power consumption. The basic sensing configuration prese
... Show MoreNon-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) accounts for about 84% of all lung cancer types diagnosed so far. Every year, regardless of gender, the NSCLC targets many communities worldwide. 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) is a uracil-analog anticancer compound. This drug tends to annihilate multiple tumour cells. But 5-FU's most significant obstacle is that it gets very easily metabolized in the blood, which eventually leads to lower anticancer activity. Therfore a perfect drug delivery system is needed to overcome all the associated challenges.
In this experiment, an attempt was made to prepare 5-FU loaded poly lactic-co-glycolic acid nanoparticles using solvent evaporation method and subsequently observed the effect of molecular weight of poly l
... Show MoreThe aim of this study is to highlight the relationship between competitive intelligence and Entrepreneurial Performance by centralizing the strategic vigilance of a sample of civil faculties in Baghdad. The sample of the study was targeted at 10 Iraqi civil colleges, which consisted of (133) members of the faculty council of the faculties, the search data was collected using the questionnaire form as the main research tool. The results showed that the correlation and influence of competitive intelligence and strategic vigilance in the Entrepreneurial Performance, as well as the role of strategic vigilance as an intermediate variable between competitive intelligence and Entrepreneurial Performance.
Abstract:
The research aims to improve the insurance service through the marketing commission as a tool that enables the insurance companies to achieve a competitive advantage. The researcher, by observing the challenges faced by insurance companies, insurance agents and brokers, raised the main question of the research: Is there an effect of the marketing commission on the competitive advantage of insurance companies? The data was obtained through the financial statements and annual reports of the research sample companies (the National General Insurance Company, the Iraqi General Insurance Company, Al-Hamra Private
... Show MoreQuantum key distribution (QKD) provides unconditional security in theory. However, practical QKD systems face challenges in maximizing the secure key rate and extending transmission distances. In this paper, we introduce a comparative study of the BB84 protocol using coincidence detection with two different quantum channels: a free space and underwater quantum channels. A simulated seawater was used as an example for underwater quantum channel. Different single photon detection modules were used on Bob’s side to capture the coincidence counts. Results showed that increasing the mean photon number generally leads to a higher rate of coincidence detection and therefore higher possibility of increasing the secure key rate. The secure key rat
... Show MoreData-driven models perform poorly on part-of-speech tagging problems with the square Hmong language, a low-resource corpus. This paper designs a weight evaluation function to reduce the influence of unknown words. It proposes an improved harmony search algorithm utilizing the roulette and local evaluation strategies for handling the square Hmong part-of-speech tagging problem. The experiment shows that the average accuracy of the proposed model is 6%, 8% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively. Meanwhile, the average F1 of the proposed model is also 6%, 3% more than HMM and BiLSTM-CRF models, respectively.