The composition of essential oil isolated from Satureja thymbra, growing wild in Libya, was analyzed by GC and GC-MS. The essential oil was characterized by γ-terpinene (39.23%), thymol (25.16%), p-cymene (7.17%) and carvacrol (4.18%) as the major constituents. Antioxidant activity was analyzed using the 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) free radical scavenging method. It possessed strong antioxidant activity (IC50 = 0.0967 mg/mL). The essential oil was also screened for its antimicrobial activity against eight bacterial and eight fungal species, showing excellent antimicrobial activity against the microorganisms used, in particular against the fungi. The oil of S. thymbra showed bacteriostatic activity at 0.001–0.1 mg/mL and was bactericidal at 0.002–0.2 mg/mL; fungistatic effects at 0.001–0.025 mg/mL and fungicidal effects at 0.001–0.1 mg/mL. The main constituents thymol, carvacrol and γ-terpinene also showed strong antimicrobial activity. The commercial fungicide bifonazole showed much lower antifungal activity than the tested oil

 The increased prevalence of hypervirulent ribotype 027 Clostridium difficile requires rapid identification of iso lates in ordertoimplementtimelyinfectioncontrol strategies. Highresolution melt(HRM) analysisof PCRprod ucts can identify strain variation amongst genera of bacteria. The intergenic (16S–23S rDNA) spacer region contains sequenceregionsconserved withingeneraandothersequenceregionvariablesbetweenspecieswithin genera. Wewished toinvestigate whether HRM analysis of PCR ribotyping products could identify ribotype 027 C. difficile. Ribotyping was performed on 93 clinical isolates and five control strains and band patterns were ana lysedusingGelComparII(AppliedMaths,USA).Real-timePCRusingribotypingprimerswasperformedandnor malised melt curves were generated. The HRM data was then imported into ScreenClust software (QIAGEN) to generate principal component analysis graphs depicting clustered relationships of strains. Ribotyping produced clear PCR bands for 88/98 isolates tested. Dendrograms generated by GelCompar showed a diversity of ribotype patterns amongst these 88 isolates with 18 groups identified with 70% homology. One clinical isolate showed 100%homologywiththecontrol027strains. ScreenClustanalysisofthe same88HRMresultsshowedclustering of isolates, with 027 strains identifiable as a unique cluster. HRM analysis correctly identified the control 027 stains and the clinical isolate shown to be 027. HRM combined with ScreenClust analysis of real-time PCR prod ucts of the 16S–23S rDNA spacer region successfully identified ribotype 027 strains. For infection control pur poses this was achieved within 2–3 h of colony isolation.

Abstract: The present study was carried out to examine the effect of aqueous suspension of

Cichorium endivia leaves powder or glibenclamide drug on some biochemical parameters in

streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. Adult male albino rats were randomly divided into 5 groups, (1)

control group which was administered distilled water, (2) Cichorium endivia group in which rats

received aqueous suspension of C. endivia leaves powder, 500 mg/kg b. wt., (3) diabetic group in

which diabetic rats were administered distilled water, (4) diabetic–Cichorium endivia group in which

diabetic rats were treated with aqueous suspension of C. endivia leaves powder, 500 mg/kg b. wt.,

and (5) diabetic–glibenclamide group in which diabetic rats were treated with glibenclamide drug, 600

mg/kg b. wt. All groups were induced by intragastric administration for six weeks. The C. endivia

leaves powder or the glibenclamide drug produced significant hepatoprotective effects by decreasing

the activities of serum aminotransferases (AST and ALT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), lactate

dehydrogenase (LDH) and liver malondialdehyde (MDA) level as well as liver superoxide dismutase

(SOD) and catalase (CAT) activities, and increasing the liver glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and

glutathione-S-transferase (GST) activities and reduced glutathione (GSH) level. In conclusion, the

results obtained clearly indicate the role of oxidative stress in induction of diabetes and suggest

protective and/or ameliorative effects of C. endivia leaves powder aqueous suspension, similar to the

diabetic drug (glibenclamide) effects in this animal model.

Positioning systems are one of the key elements required by location-based services (LBS). As global positioning system (GPS) was never intended for indoor environments, indoor positioning systems based on wireless local area networks (WLAN) have been proposed as a viable solution. RADAR algorithm is one of the famous indoor positioning techniques. It uses a database of predetermined fingerprints for selected locations to estimate the location of a mobile user in the signal space. Another new proposed algorithm named the Enhanced Fingerprint (EFP) uses the same principle as RADAR algorithm but with more than one fingerprint per location. In this paper we investigated the location fingerprint based algorithms by taking RADAR and EFP with more details. We evaluated these two algorithms in terms of accuracy, reliability and computation time. Experiment results show that the EFP algorithm gains 1.82 m of accuracy over RADAR algorithm, while the last one saves 75% of computation time. We found that EFP algorithm is more consistent with varying number of training samples.