Antipyretic and antibacterial activity of Chloranthus erectus (Buch.-Ham.) Verdcourt leaf extract: A popular folk medicine of Arunachal Pradesh

Objective : The main objective of this work was to study the antipyretic and antibacterial activity of C. erectus (Buch.-Ham.) Verdcourt leaf extract in an experimental albino rat model. Materials and Methods : The methanol extract of C. erectus leaf (MECEL) was evaluated for its antipyretic potential on normal body temperature and Brewers yeast-induced pyrexia in albino rats model. While the antibacterial activity of MECEL against five Gram (-) and three Gram () bacterial strains and antimycotic activity was investigated against four fungi using agar disk diffusion and microdilution methods. Result : Yeast suspension (10 mL/kg b.w.) elevated rectal temperature after 19 h of subcutaneous injection. Oral administration of MECEL at 100 and 200 mg/kg b.w. showed significant reduction of normal rectal body temperature and yeast-provoked elevated temperature (38.8 0.2 and 37.6 0.4, respectively, at 2-3 h) in a dose-dependent manner, and the effect was comparable to that of the standard antipyretic drug-paracetamol (150 mg/kg b.w.). MECEL at 2 mg/disk showed broad spectrum of growth inhibition activity against both groups of bacteria. However, MECEL was not effective against the yeast strains tested in this study. Conclusion : This study revealed that the methanol extract of C. erectus exhibited significant antipyretic activity in the tested models and antibacterial activity as well, and may provide the scientific rationale for its popular use as antipyretic agent in Khamptiss folk medicines.

An ethnobotanical study of traditional anti-inflammatory plants used by the Lohit community of Arunachal Pradesh, India

Aim of the study: Most people especially in rural areas depend on herbal medicines to treat many diseases including inflammation-related ailments such as rheumatism, muscle swelling, cut wound, accidental bone fracture, insect bites, pains and burn by fire and hot water. The objectives of this study were: to catalog ethno-medicinal plants of Lohit community, ecological status, indigenous folk medicinal uses, morphological parts used and to determine their reported pharmacological studies. Materials and methods: The ethnobotanical information on traditional medicinal plants exclusively used for management of inflammation-related ailments by the Khampti community of Arunachal Pradesh, India was based on first-hand field survey work through semi-structured interviews. Results and conclusion: A total of 34 species in 32 genera and 22 families were encountered during the field survey. Botanical families such as Asteraceae, Euphorbiaceae, Zingiberaceae and Lamiaceae were represented by the highest numbers of species reported in this study. Thirteen plant species, namely: Bombax ceiba, Canarium strictum, Chloranthus erectus, Xanthium indicum, Lycopodium clavatum, Coleus blumei, Batrachospermum atrum, Chlorella vulgaris, Marchantia palmata, Marchantia polymorpha, Eria pannea, Sterculia villosa and Alpinia galanga are reported for the first time for the treatment of inflammation-related diseases.

Evaluation of anti-inflammatory potential of Chloranthus erectus (Buch.-Ham.) Verd. leaf extract in rats

Aim of the study: Chloranthus erectus (Buch.-Ham.) Verdcourt (Chloranthaceae) is a shrub native to tropical and temperate zone of Eastern Himalaya of India and South-East Asia and have traditionally been used as a folklore medicine to treat localised swelling, joint pain, skin inflammation, fever and bodyache. In this study, an attempthas been made to demonstrate the anti-inflammatory activity of methanol extract obtained from Chloranthus erectus leaves (MECEL) in acute, sub-acute and chronic mouse models. Materials and methods: Inflammation in the hind paw of Wistar albino rat was induced by carrageenan, histamine and serotonin, and tissue granuloma pouch was induced by cotton pellet method. Antiinflammatory drug-phenylbutazone was used as standard drug for comparison. Results: In acute carrageenan-induced rat hind paw edema, oral administration of MECEL at 200 mg/kg produced significant inhibition of edema by 38.34 % (p<0.01) while the histamine- and serotonin-induced sub-acute model, the inhibition of paw edema reached 52.54 % (p < 0.001) and 25.5 % (p < 0.01), respectively. in a 7-day study, MECEL at 20 and 50 mg/kg produced significant suppression of cotton pellet-induced tissue granuloma formation in rats. Conclusions: This preliminary study revealed that the methanol extract of Chloranthus erectus exhibited significant anti-inflammatory activity in the tested models, and may provide the scientific rationale for its popular folk medicine as anti-inflammatory agent.

Local polynomial convexity of the union of two totally-real surfaces at their intersection

We consider the following question: Let S (1) and S (2) be two smooth, totally-real surfaces in C-2 that contain the origin. If the union of their tangent planes is locally polynomially convex at the origin, then is S-1 boolean OR S-2 locally polynomially convex at the origin? If T (0) S (1) a (c) T (0) S (2) = {0}, then it is a folk result that the answer is yes. We discuss an obstruction to the presumed proof, and provide a different approach. When dim(R)(T0S1 boolean AND T0S2) = 1, we present a geometric condition under which no consistent answer to the above question exists. We then discuss conditions under which we can expect local polynomial convexity.

An inventory of the ethnobotanicals used as anti-diabetic by a rural community of Dhemaji district of Assam, Northeast India

Ethnopharmacological relevance: Traditional remedies used for treating diabetic ailments are very important in the primary health care of the people living in rural Dhemaji district of Assam, north-east India. Novel information gathered from the current survey is important in preserving folk indigenous knowledge. Materials and methods: Interviews were conducted amongst 80 households comprising of 240 individuals using semi-structured questionnaires. The focus was on plants used in treating diabetes mellitus. Results: The current survey documented 21 plant species (20 families) which are reportedly used to treat diabetes mellitus by the rural people in the study area. To the best of our knowledge, Amomum linguiforme, Cinnamomum impressinervium, Colocasia esculenta, Dillenia indica, Euphorbia ligularia, Garcinia pedunculata, Solanum indicum, Sterculia villosa and Tabernaemontana divaricata are recorded for the first time based on globally published literature as medicinal plants used for treating diabetes mellitus and related symptoms. Conclusions: The wide variety of plants that are used to treat diabetes mellitus in this area supports the traditional value that medicinal plants have in the primary health care system of the rural people of Dhemaji district of Assam. The finding of new plant uses in the current study reveals the importance of the documentation of such ethnobotanical knowledge. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Herbal medicines used in the treatment of diabetes mellitus in Arunachal Himalaya, northeast, India

Ethnopharmacological relevance: Medicinal plants have played an important role in treating and preventing a variety of diseases throughout the world. Khampti tribal people living in the far-flung Lohit district of the Eastern Arunachal Himalaya, India still depend on medicinal plants and most of them have a general knowledge of medicinal plants which are used for treating a variety of ailments. This survey was undertaken in Lohit district in order to inventory the medicinal plants used in folk medicine to treat diabetes mellitus. Materials and methods: Field investigations were conducted in seventeen remote villages of Lohit district starting from April 2002 to May 2004 through interviews among 251 key informants who were selected randomly during our household survey. To elucidate community domains and determine differences in indigenous traditional knowledge of medicinal plants with anti-diabetic efficacy, we repeated our field survey starting from April 2008 to May 2010 with one hundred traditional healers locally called as ``Chau ya'' in Khampti of Lohit district. ``Chau ya'' traditional healers who know and use medicinal plants for treating diabetes mellitus were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. Results: This study reports an ethnobotanical survey of medicinal plants in Lohit district of Arunachal Pradesh reputed for the treatment of diabetes mellitus. Forty-six plant species were identified in the study area to treat diabetes mellitus by the Khamptis ``Chau ya'' traditional healers. Comparative published literature survey analysis of this study with other ethnobotanical surveys of plants used traditionally in treating diabetes mellitus suggests that eleven plant species make claims of new reports on antidiabetic efficacy. These plant species are Begonia roxburghii, Calamus tenuis, Callicarpa arborea, Cuscuta reflexa, Dillenia indica, Diplazium esculentum, Lectuca gracilis, Millingtonia hortensis, Oxalis griffithii, Saccharum spontaneum, and Solanum viarum. Some of the plants reported in this study have an antidiabetic effect on rodent models but none have sufficient clinical evidence of effectiveness. Conclusions: The wide variety of medicinal plants that are used to treat diabetes mellitus in this area supports the importance of plants in the primary healthcare system of the rural people of Lohit district of Arunachal Pradesh. The finding of new plant uses in the current study reveals the importance of the documentation of such ethnobotanical knowledge. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Extension of TSVM to multi-class and hierarchical text classification problems With general losses

Transductive SVM (TSVM) is a well known semi-supervised large margin learning method for binary text classification. In this paper we extend this method to multi-class and hierarchical classification problems. We point out that the determination of labels of unlabeled examples with fixed classifier weights is a linear programming problem. We devise an efficient technique for solving it. The method is applicable to general loss functions. We demonstrate the value of the new method using large margin loss on a number of multi-class and hierarchical classification datasets. For maxent loss we show empirically that our method is better than expectation regularization/constraint and posterior regularization methods, and competitive with the version of entropy regularization method which uses label constraints.

A simple Kontinuitatssatz

We are interested in several informal statements referred as ``Kontinuitatssatz'' in the recent literature on analytic continuation. The basic (unstated) principle that seems to be in use in these works appears to be a folk theorem. We provide a precise statement of this folk Kontinuitatssatz and give a proof of it.

BELIEF PROPAGATION FOR OPTIMAL EDGE COVER IN THE RANDOM COMPLETE GRAPH

We apply the objective method of Aldous to the problem of finding the minimum-cost edge cover of the complete graph with random independent and identically distributed edge costs. The limit, as the number of vertices goes to infinity, of the expected minimum cost for this problem is known via a combinatorial approach of Hessler and Wastlund. We provide a proof of this result using the machinery of the objective method and local weak convergence, which was used to prove the (2) limit of the random assignment problem. A proof via the objective method is useful because it provides us with more information on the nature of the edge's incident on a typical root in the minimum-cost edge cover. We further show that a belief propagation algorithm converges asymptotically to the optimal solution. This can be applied in a computational linguistics problem of semantic projection. The belief propagation algorithm yields a near optimal solution with lesser complexity than the known best algorithms designed for optimality in worst-case settings.

Translation Induction on Indian Language Corpora Using Translingual Themes from Other Languages

Identifying translations from comparable corpora is a well-known problem with several applications, e.g. dictionary creation in resource-scarce languages. Scarcity of high quality corpora, especially in Indian languages, makes this problem hard, e.g. state-of-the-art techniques achieve a mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.66 for English-Italian, and a mere 0.187 for Telugu-Kannada. There exist comparable corpora in many Indian languages with other ``auxiliary'' languages. We observe that translations have many topically related words in common in the auxiliary language. To model this, we define the notion of a translingual theme, a set of topically related words from auxiliary language corpora, and present a probabilistic framework for translation induction. Extensive experiments on 35 comparable corpora using English and French as auxiliary languages show that this approach can yield dramatic improvements in performance (e.g. MRR improves by 124% to 0.419 for Telugu-Kannada). A user study on WikiTSu, a system for cross-lingual Wikipedia title suggestion that uses our approach, shows a 20% improvement in the quality of titles suggested.