Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a gram negative bacterium and causes gastrointestinal illness in humans. In this study, twenty five out of fifty cockle samples from Padang, Indonesia produced purple colonies when they were grown on selective medium, CHROMagarTM Vibrio. Specific–PCR for toxR gene detection gave positive results in which a band with 368 base pairs size appeared on the gel for all the isolates that confirmed the presence of V. parahaemolyticus. In the virulence properties test, all the isolates showed negative results for tdh and trh genes detection. The results indicate that the isolates under this study do not contain virulence properties that correlate to the ability of infection and diseases, which means that they are nonpathogenic.
In this study, RAPD-PCR and ERIC-PCR were used to study the epidemiology of V. parahaemolyticus isolated from cockles in Padang, Indonesia. The Gold Oligo OPAR3 primer produced bands ranged from 1-8 with sizes from 0.2 – 5.0 kb and the Gold Oligo OPAR8 primer produced 1-7 bands with sizes 0.7 – 1.5 kb. Both primers produced twenty five RAPD patterns with a few isolates failed to produce any products. Based on phylogenetic dendrogram, all the isolates can be divided into 6 major clusters with similarity between 0 to 52%. For the ERIC primer, it produced bands ranged from 3-15 with sizes from 0.1 – 5.0 kb and twenty seven different ERIC patterns. Construction of the phylogenetic dendogram showed the isolates can be divided into 4 major clusters with similarity between 56 to 86%. The high diversity of both processes may be due to the multiple contamination sources of V. parahaemolyticus.
The spray-dried Vernonia amygdalina water extract was evaluated for antidiabetic effect using normoglycaemic, glucose induced hyperglycaemic and streptozotocin induced diabetic mice. This effect was compared with an oral dose of Momordica charantia. Besides, acute toxicity of the extract was also evaluated at concentration 2000 and 5000 mg/kg body weight. The extract was able to reduce blood glucose level in glucose and streptozotocin induced hyperglycaemic mice without causing hypoglycemic effect on fasting normoglycaemic mice. Moreover, mice appeared to be normal and no mortality was observed in the acute toxicity study after treated with up to 5000mg/kg of extract. These results indicated that the spray-dried Vernonia amygdalina water extract was a potential antidiabetic agent which does not induce hypoglycemic and acute toxicity on normal subject.
Murraya paniculata (Linn) Jack (Orange Jasmine), known as "Kemuning Putih" in Malaysia, has been widely used as food flavor additive in cuisine by local residences. This is due to the strong fragrances of the leaves which make it suitable to be used in Indian and Malay dishes. Besides as a flavoring, leaves, branches, stem barks and roots of the plant are used in folk medicine to treat dysentery and morning sickness. Flowers of the plants are used in cosmetics. Since 1970’s, flavonoids and coumarins were isolated from Murraya paniculata, but no further bioactivity has been tested from the isolated compounds. The aim of this paper is to review and update the research related to chemical constituents and bioactivities of Murraya paniculata (L) Jack.
Vibrio parahaemolyticus is one of the most widely recognized pathogenic Vibrio species due to numerous outbreaks and its’ wide occurrence in marine environment. In this study, 32 isolates of V. parahaemolyticus isolated from cockles were tested for sensitivity to 16 antibiotics and the presence of plasmids. All the isolates were multi-resistance, defined as resistant to atleast three different antibiotics with multiple antibiotic resistance indexes ranging from 0.31 to 0.69, indicating the isolates originate from high risk sources of contamination where antibiotics are often used. In the plasmid profiling test, only 15 isolates (47%) harbored plasmid DNA, which ranged in size from 2.7 to 56.2 kb, separating the isolates into 14 plasmid profiles. Hence, food contaminated with antibiotic resistant V. parahaemolyticus could be a major threat to public health due to the distinct possibility that they can be a significant reservoir of genes encoding antibiotic resistance determinants that can be transferred intra or interspecies. As in many developing countries, raw food hygiene and antimicrobial resistance epidemiology is still in the infancy stage in the locality of the study and thus our data provide a current baseline profile of antimicrobial resistance and plasmid of V. parahaemolyticusfrom cockles in Padang, Indonesia.
To study the wound healing efficacy of breadfruit starch hydrolysate, an in vitro wound scratch assay was conducted, in which the migration rate of wounded NIH 3T3 fibroblasts was determined. Wounds treated with lower dextrose equivalent (DE), (DE 10-14) starch hydrolysate were found capable to improve the wound healing of NIH 3T3 fibroblast cell with the percentage of wound closure improvement of 77%, respectively when compared with higher DE range (DE 15-19 and DE 20-24). The findings obtained in the BrdU uptake and MTT viability assays confirmed the wound healing properties of breadfruit starch hydrolysate as the starch hydrolysate-treated wounded NIH 3T3 fibroblasts were able to proliferate well and no cytotoxicity was observed. Together, these findings indicated that the newly developed breadfruit starch hydrolysate performed better than commercial (COM) starch hydrolysate of the same DE ranges. In conclusion, breadfruit starch hydrolysate had better functional properties than did starch hydrolysates derived from other sources and that they could play a beneficial role in wound healing applications.