Hepatoprotective effects of setarud against carbon tetrachloride-induced liver injury in rats.

To assess the hepatoprotective activity of a new herbal drug "setarud" in experimental liver fibrosis, 48 male Wistar rats were divided into four groups: controls, carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) group, and two treatment groups that received CCl4 and setarud at doses of 0.02 or 0.04 g/Kg/day for 30 days. Body weight gain, biochemical liver tests, bile flow rate and composition, and changes in liver morphology in the four groups were studied. CCl4 administration led to morphological and biochemical evidence of liver injury as compared to untreated controls. Setarud administration led to significant protection against CCl4-induced changes in body weight gain, liver morphology, bile flow and concentration. It was also associated with significantly lower serum liver enzyme levels (p<0.01), higher serum albumin level, and reduced increase in narcotic-induced sleeping time. Thus, setarud showed protective activity against CCl4-induced hepatotoxicity in rats. Further studies of its efficacy in liver disease are warranted.

A serological screening assay of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 antibodies based on recombinant protein p24-gp41 as a fusion protein expressed in Escherichia coli.

The objective of this study was expression of a recombinant fusion protein p24-gp41 to gain a proper folding pattern of the proteins which could be recognized by specific antibodies against human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) for development of a reliable serodiagnostic kit. Serodiagnostic method using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) with the expressed recombinant fusion protein p24-gp41 was carried out to test the sensitivity and specificity of the protein using human sera and various reference panels from Boston Biomedica Inc. (BBI). The level of the expression was determined to be 30% and the final recovery from fermentation and purification process was calculated as 80 mg/L with more than 98% purity. The developed ELISA assay was demonstrated to have 100 and 99.5% sensitivity and specificity, respectively, detecting anti-HIV-1 antibody using 900 positive and 10,000 negative human sera. The developed assay showed reliable results in comparison with other reference HIV ELISA kits using various BBI panels as well. In conclusion, the recombinant fusion protein p24-gp41 was expressed and used to develop a serodiagnostic kit for screening of the HIV-1 with high sensitivity (100%) and specificity (99.5%) which could be useful for screening large groups of blood donors.