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J Ethnopharmacol 2021 Apr 13:114119. Epub 2021 Apr 13.

Dongzhimen Hospital, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China; School of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China. Electronic address:

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: WeiChang'An Pill (WCAP) is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to clinically treat diarrhoea-predominant irritable bowel syndrome (IBS-D); however, the underlying pharmacological mechanisms are unclear to date.

Aim Of The Study: To explore the mechanism underlying the therapeutic action of WCAP in IBS-D using a network pharmacology approach and in vivo experiments.

Materials And Methods: The active compounds of WCAP were selected from the TCM Systems Pharmacology Database and TCM Integrated Database, and the potential targets were identified using the Swiss Target Prediction and Similarity Ensemble Approach (SEA) databases. Read More

Dev Comp Immunol 2021 Apr 13:104102. Epub 2021 Apr 13.

Joint Laboratory of Guangdong Province and Hong Kong Regions on Marine Bioresource Conservation and Exploitation, College of Marine Sciences, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 510642, PR China; Guangdong Laboratory for Lingnan Modern Agriculture, Guangzhou, 510642, China. Electronic address:

CD63 is a member of the four-transmembrane-domain protein superfamily and is the first characterized tetraspanin protein. In the present study, we cloned the common carp (Cyprinus Carpio) CD63 (ccCD63) sequence and found that the ccCD63 ORF contained 711 bp and encoded a protein of 236 amino acids. Homology analysis revealed that the complete ccCD63 sequence had 84. Read More

Drug Deliv Transl Res 2021 Apr 15. Epub 2021 Apr 15.

CNC - Center for Neurosciences and Cell Biology, Center for Innovative Biomedicine and Biotechnology (CIBB), Faculty of Medicine (Polo 1), Rua Larga, University of Coimbra, 3004-504, Coimbra, Portugal.

Strategies targeting nucleolin have enabled a significant improvement in intracellular bioavailability of their encapsulated payloads. In this respect, assessment of the impact of target cell heterogeneity and nucleolin homology across species (structurally and functionally) is of major importance. This work also aimed at mathematically modelling the nucleolin expression levels at the cell membrane, binding and internalization of pH-sensitive pegylated liposomes encapsulating doxorubicin and functionalized with the nucleolin-binding F3 peptide (PEGASEMP), and resulting cytotoxicity against cancer cells from mouse, rat, canine, and human origin. Read More

Braz J Microbiol 2021 Apr 15. Epub 2021 Apr 15.

Institute of Biotechnology, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Hanoi, 10000, Vietnam.

Although Phu Quoc island, Gulf of Thailand possesses diverse marine and coastal ecosystems, biodiversity and metabolic capability of microbial communities remain poorly investigated. The aim of our study was to evaluate the biodiversity and metabolic potential of sediment microbial communities in Phu Quoc island. The marine sediments were collected from three different areas and analyzed by using 16S rRNA gene-based amplicon approach. Read More

Biomed Res Int 2021 27;2021:5533210. Epub 2021 Mar 27.

Institute of Animal Nutrition, Sichuan Agricultural University, Sichuan Province, Chengdu 611130, China.

This study elucidated the function role of dietary selenium-enriched yeast (SeY) supplementation on growth performance, immune function, and antioxidant capacity in weaned pigs exposure to oxidative stress. Thirty-two similarity weight pigs were randomly divided into four treatments: (1) nonchallenged control, (2) control+SeY, (3) control+diquat, and (4) control+SeY+diquat. The period of experiment was 21 days; on day 16, pigs were injected with diquat or sterile saline. Read More

PeerJ 2021 31;9:e11019. Epub 2021 Mar 31.

Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA.

Despite many bioinformatic solutions for analyzing sequencing data, few options exist for targeted sequence retrieval from whole genomic sequencing (WGS) data with the ultimate goal of generating a phylogeny. Available tools especially struggle at deep phylogenetic levels and necessitate amino-acid space searches, which may increase rates of false positive results. Many tools are also difficult to install and may lack adequate user resources. Read More

PeerJ 2021 29;9:e10966. Epub 2021 Mar 29.

Qinghai Key Laboratory of Vegetable Genetics and Physiology, Agriculture and Forestry Sciences Institute of Qinghai University, Qinghai University, Xining, P.R. China.

(Pepino) is an increasingly popular solanaceous crop and is tolerant of drought conditions. In this study, 71 NAC transcription factor family genes of were selected to provide a theoretical basis for subsequent in-depth study of their regulatory roles in the response to biological and abiotic stresses, and were subjected to whole-genome analysis. The NAC sequences obtained by transcriptome sequencing were subjected to bioinformatics prediction and analysis. Read More

Parasit Vectors 2021 Apr 12;14(1):196. Epub 2021 Apr 12.

Marine Zoology Unit, Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, Science Park, University of Valencia, PO Box 22085, Valencia, 46071, Spain.

Background: Current data about Pseudaliidae show contrasting patterns of host specificity between congeneric species. We investigated how both contact and compatibility between hosts and parasites contributed to the patterns of lungworm infection observed in a community of five species of cetaceans in the western Mediterranean.

Methods: The lungs of 119 striped dolphins Stenella coeruleoalba, 18 bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus, 7 Risso's dolphins Grampus griseus, 7 long-finned pilot whales Globicephala melas, and 6 common dolphins Delphinus delphis were analysed for lungworms. Read More

Rev Med Chil 2020 Oct;148(10):1452-1460

Universidad de Talca, Talca, Chile.

Background: Self-efficacy is a psychological variable closely related to healthy behaviors. One of the most widely used instruments to measure this variable is the general self-efficacy scale (GSES). In Chile, the only psychometric study of this scale has important analytical limitations. Read More

Transl Psychiatry 2021 Apr 9;11(1):212. Epub 2021 Apr 9.

Neuronal Oscillations Laboratory, Division of Neurogeriatrics, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Center for Alzheimer Research, Karolinska Institutet, 17164, Solna, Sweden.

Gamma and theta brain rhythms play important roles in cognition and their interaction can affect gamma oscillation features. Hippocampal theta oscillations depend on cholinergic and GABAergic input from the medial septum-diagonal band of Broca. These projecting neurons undergo degeneration during aging and maintain high levels of neurotrophin receptor p75 (p75). Read More

Sci Rep 2021 Apr 8;11(1):7697. Epub 2021 Apr 8.

Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel.

Human brains have a remarkable ability to separate streams of visual input into distinct memory-traces. It is unclear, however, how this ability relates to the way these inputs are explored via unique gaze-patterns. Moreover, it is yet unknown how motivation to forget or remember influences the link between gaze similarity and memory. Read More

J Gen Virol 2021 Apr;102(4)

Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712, USA.

Mosquito-borne arboviruses, including a diverse array of alphaviruses and flaviviruses, lead to hundreds of millions of human infections each year. Current methods for species-level classification of arboviruses adhere to guidelines prescribed by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV), and generally apply a polyphasic approach that might include information about viral vectors, hosts, geographical distribution, antigenicity, levels of DNA similarity, disease association and/or ecological characteristics. However, there is substantial variation in the criteria used to define viral species, which can lead to the establishment of artificial boundaries between species and inconsistencies when inferring their relatedness, variation and evolutionary history. Read More

Arch Microbiol 2021 Apr 8. Epub 2021 Apr 8.

Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Zdravstvena pot 5, 1000, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The diversity of 61 Bacillus cereus strains isolated from different clinical specimens, food including raw milk and milk products, and water was evaluated. PFGE analysis could discriminate 61 distinct pulsotypes with similarity levels from 25 to 82%, which were divided into 13 clonal complexes. The similarity between clonal complexes was at least 40%. Read More

PeerJ 2021 22;9:e10677. Epub 2021 Mar 22.

Instituto de Botánica del Nordeste (UNNE-CONICET), Corrientes Capital, Corrientes, Argentina.

is the most specious genus of the Squamata lizards in South America, presenting exceptional evolutionary radiation and speciation patterns. This recent diversification complicates the formal taxonomic treatment and the phylogenetic analyses of this group, causing relationships among species to remain controversial. Here we used Next-Generation Sequencing to do a comparative analysis of the structure and organization of the complete mitochondrial genomes of three differently related species of and with different reproductive strategies and ploidy levels. Read More

J Eye Mov Res 2020 Sep 9;13(6). Epub 2020 Sep 9.

This paper describes the use of semantic similarity measures based on distributed representations of words, sentences, and paragraphs (so-called "embeddings") to assess the impact of supra-lexical factors on eye-movement data from early readers of Chinese. In addition, we used a corpus-based measure of surprisal to assess the impact of local word predictability. Eye movement data from 56 Chinese students were collected (a) in the students' 4th grade and (b) one year later while they were in 5th grade. Read More

Org Lett 2021 Apr 7;23(8):3162-3166. Epub 2021 Apr 7.

Institute of Organic Chemistry, Leibniz University Hannover, Schneiderberg 1B, 30167 Hannover, Germany.

The sesquiterpene cyclases pentalenene synthase (PenA) and two Δ-protoilludene synthases Omp6 and Omp7 convert a FPP ether into several new tetrahydrofurano terpenoids, one of which is also formed as the main product by the sesquiterpene cyclase BcBOT2. Thus, PenA, Omp6/7, and BcBOT2 follow closely related catalytic pathways and induce similar folding of their diphosphate substrates despite low levels of amino acid sequence similarity. Some of the new terpenoids show pronounced olfactoric properties. Read More

Plant Cell Physiol 2021 Apr 7. Epub 2021 Apr 7.

Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan.

Molybdenum (Mo) is an essential element for plant growth and is utilized by several key enzymes in biological redox processes. Rice assimilates molybdate ions via OsMOT1;1, a transporter with a high affinity for molybdate. However, other systems involved in the molecular transport of molybdate in rice remain unclear. Read More

Nat Commun 2021 04 6;12(1):2065. Epub 2021 Apr 6.

Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly used to model human vision due to their high object categorization capabilities and general correspondence with human brain responses. Here we evaluate the performance of 14 different CNNs compared with human fMRI responses to natural and artificial images using representational similarity analysis. Despite the presence of some CNN-brain correspondence and CNNs' impressive ability to fully capture lower level visual representation of real-world objects, we show that CNNs do not fully capture higher level visual representations of real-world objects, nor those of artificial objects, either at lower or higher levels of visual representations. Read More

Mol Biol Evol 2021 Apr 2. Epub 2021 Apr 2.

Department of Theoretical Biology, National Institute for Basic Biology, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Okazaki, Aichi, 444-8585, Japan.

Accurate determination of the evolutionary relationships between genes is a foundational challenge in biology. Homology - evolutionary relatedness - is in many cases readily determined based on sequence similarity analysis. By contrast, whether or not two genes directly descended from a common ancestor by a speciation event (orthologs) or duplication event (paralogs) is more challenging, yet provides critical information on the history of a gene. Read More

Eur J Radiol 2021 Mar 30;139:109686. Epub 2021 Mar 30.

Department of Medical Imaging, Radboud University Medical Center, Geert Grooteplein 10, 6525 GA, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; Dutch Expert Centre for Screening (LRCB), Wijchenseweg 101, 6538 SW, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Electronic address:

Purpose: To validate a candidate instrument, to be used by different professionals to assess image quality in digital mammography (DM), against detection performance results.

Methods: A receiver operating characteristics (ROC) study was conducted to assess the detection performance in DM images with four different image quality levels due to different quality issues. Fourteen expert breast radiologists from five countries assessed a set of 80 DM cases, containing 60 lesions (40 cancers, 20 benign findings) and 20 normal cases. Read More

Med Drug Discov 2021 Mar 30:100090. Epub 2021 Mar 30.

GeneNet Pharmaceuticals, Tianjin, China.

The COVID-19 disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a health crisis worldwide. While developing novel drugs and vaccines is long, repurposing existing drugs against COVID-19 can yield treatments with known preclinical, pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic, and toxicity profiles, which can rapidly enter clinical trials. In this study, we present a novel network-based drug repurposing platform to identify candidates for the treatment of COVID-19. Read More

PeerJ Comput Sci 2020 23;6:e262. Epub 2020 Mar 23.

Department of Information Science and Engineering, CMR Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka, India.

The vast volume of documents available in legal databases demands effective information retrieval approaches which take into consideration the intricacies of the legal domain. Relevant document retrieval is the backbone of the legal domain. The concept of relevance in the legal domain is very complex and multi-faceted. Read More

Viruses 2021 Mar 5;13(3). Epub 2021 Mar 5.

Innovation Team of Small Animal Infectious Disease, Shanghai Veterinary Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, Shanghai 200241, China.

The mitochondrial antiviral-signaling protein (MAVS, also known as VISA, IPS-1, or CARDIF) plays an essential role in the type I interferon (IFN) response and in retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I) mediated antiviral innate immunity in mammals. In this study, the caprine MAVS gene (caMAVS, 1566 bp) was identified and cloned. The caMAVS shares the highest amino acid similarity (98. Read More

J Clin Med 2021 Mar 2;10(5). Epub 2021 Mar 2.

Department of Prosthodontics, School of Dentistry and Dental Research Institute, Seoul National University, Daehak-ro 101, Jongro-gu, Seoul 03080, Korea.

Determining the peri-implant marginal bone level on radiographs is challenging because the boundaries of the bones around implants are often unclear or the heights of the buccal and lingual bone levels are different. Therefore, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) was evaluated for detecting the marginal bone level, top, and apex of implants on dental periapical radiographs. An automated assistant system was proposed for calculating the bone loss percentage and classifying the bone resorption severity. Read More

Int J Mol Sci 2021 Mar 6;22(5). Epub 2021 Mar 6.

Department of Biomedical & Clinical Sciences (BKV), Linköping University, SE-58185 Linköping, Sweden.

A combined Genotyping By Sequencing (GBS) and methylated DNA immunoprecipitation (MeDIP) protocol was used to identify-in parallel-genetic variation (Genomic-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and epigenetic differences of Differentially Methylated Regions (DMR) in the genome of spermatozoa from the porcine animal model. Breeding boars with good semen quality ( = 11) and specific and well-documented differences in fertility (farrowing rate, FR) and prolificacy (litter size, LS) ( = 7) in artificial insemination programs, using combined FR and LS, were categorized as High Fertile (HF, = 4) or Low Fertile (LF, = 3), and boars with Unknown Fertility (UF, = 4) were tested for eventual epigenetical similarity with those fertility-proven. We identified 165,944 Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) that explained 14-15% of variance among selection lines. Read More

Mol Phylogenet Evol 2021 Mar 30;161:107165. Epub 2021 Mar 30.

Dept. of Biology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, United States.

Introgressive hybridization can be a powerful force impacting patterns of evolution at multiple taxonomic levels. We aimed to understand how introgression has affected speciation and diversification within a species complex of jumping spiders. The Habronattus americanus subgroup is a recently radiating group of jumping spiders, with species now in contact after hypothesized periods of isolation during glaciation cycles of the Pleistocene. Read More

Integr Org Biol 2020 26;2(1):obaa034. Epub 2020 Dec 26.

Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA.

Research on monogamy has largely focused on marked behaviors that are unique to pair bonded partners. However, these marked behaviors represent only a subset of the pair-directed behaviors that partners engage in; the influence of pair bonding on mundane or subtle social interactions among partners remains largely unknown. In this study, we describe the changes that occur during brief social reunions (or greets) over the course of pair bonding in zebra finches. Read More

PLoS One 2021 31;16(3):e0247353. Epub 2021 Mar 31.

BioMotion Center, Institute of Sports and Sports Science, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Background: Air-rifle and small-bore shooting are fascinating Olympic sports due to their unique performance requirements for accuracy and precision.

Objective: The purpose of our study was to systematically research the literature to determine and summarize performance determinants in both air-rifle and small-bore shooting. Since some athletes participate internationally in both disciplines in competition, the disciplines must have some similarity in the performance structure. Read More

FEMS Microbiol Ecol 2021 Mar 30. Epub 2021 Mar 30.

Instituto Tecnológico de Chascomús (INTECH), UNSAM-CONICET, Chascomús, Argentina.

In aquatic systems, an interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes determines the dynamic of picocyanobacteria (Pcy) abundance and community structure. Here, we analyzed a 10-year time series (sampled fortnightly) from a hypereutrophic turbid shallow lake located within the Pampa Region of South America, generating the first long-term record of freshwater Pcy from the Southern Hemisphere. We used a cytometric approach to study Pcy community, and focused on its relations with nutrient and light conditions (bottom-up) and potential grazers (top-down). Read More

Clin Biomech (Bristol, Avon) 2021 Mar 26;84:105339. Epub 2021 Mar 26.

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100086, China; Biomechanics and Biotechnology Lab, Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen, Shenzhen 518057, China. Electronic address:

Background: Anterior lumbar interbody fusion combined with supplementary fixation has been widely used to treat lumbar diseases. However, few studies have investigated the influence of fixation options on facet joint force and cage subsidence. The aim of this study was to explore the biomechanical performance of anterior lumbar interbody fusion with various fixation options under both static and vertical vibration loading conditions. Read More