ABSTRACT
Background: Medical students are using more applications of smartphones in their course besides the primary purpose of communication. The excessive usage of smartphone has given rise to a condition known as “nomophobia”. The objectives of the study are to estimate the prevalence of nomophobia and to evaluate the determinants of nomophobia among participants. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from July to August 2022 among 320 undergraduate medical students of Sri Venkateswara Medical College, Tirupati. NMP-Q questionnaire used as a tool for data collection. Ethical clearance was obtained from the Institutional Ethical Committee and informed consent was taken from the participant. Collected data was coded and entered into a Microsoft excel and analysed using statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) software version 21.0. Results: Prevalence of nomophobia among study subjects was found to be 100% (320); of which 59% showed moderate nomophobia followed by mild (35%) and severe nomophobia (6%). Nearly 60% of the students are using smart phone for communication, 56% for entertainment and 46% for study purpose. Conclusions: All participants were suffering from nomophobia with different grades of severity. It was significantly associated with age, year of study, number of apps used, average time spent with mobile and messages sent per day. Most of them were using smart phone for communication, entertainment and study purpose.
ABSTRACT
Most of the antigens of Mycobacterium leprae that have been identified are members of stress protein families. 18kDa antigen of M. leprae is an important antigen in the immune response to leprosy. This protein antigen of M. leprae is related to the family of small heat shock protein. To predict the structure of 18kDa antigen and to understand the mechanisms of inhibitors interaction, a threedimensional model was generated based on the Crystal Structure and assembly of eukaryotic small heat shock protein (PDB: 1GME) by using MODELLER7v7. The structure having a least modeller objective function was used as a starting point for picoseconds-duration molecular dynamics simulations. With the aid of the molecular dynamics and minimization methods, the final refined model was obtained and was further assessed by ERRAT, WHATCHECK and PROCHECK, which suggested that the refined model was reliable. Docking studies were performed by using the models with 2-mercaptoethanol and 3-amino- 5-methylhexanoic acid inhibitors. The results indicate that the 3-amino-5,5-diphenylpentanoic acid has more affinity than the other drug derivatives. The docking studies also suggest that MET-03, ARG-04, ASP-31, ALA-32, TRP-33, ARG-34, GLU-35 ARG-89, GLN-90 LEU-91 and VAL-92 are important determinant residues in binding with ligands. From the docking studies, we also suggest that GLU-35, in 18kDa protein domain is an important residue in binding.