Recent advances in microbiome studies have revealed much information about how the gut virome, mycobiome, and gut bacteria influence health and disease. Over the years, many studies have reported associations between the gut microflora under differen...
To date, there is a lack of research into the vaginal and sperm microbiome and its bearing on artificial insemination (AI) success in the ovine species. Using hypervariable regions V3–V4 of the 16S rRNA, we describe, for the first time, the com...
There is a misconception that intrinsic disorder in proteins is equivalent to darkness. The present study aims to establish, in the scope of the Swiss-Prot and Dark Proteome databases, the relationship between disorder and darkness. Three distinct pr...
Despite the huge decrease in deaths caused by Shigella worldwide in recent decades, shigellosis still causes over 200,000 deaths every year. No vaccine is currently available, and the morbidity of the disease coupled with the rise of antimicrobial re...
Genetic counseling applied to limb–girdle muscular dystrophies (LGMDs) can be very challenging due to their clinical and genetic heterogeneity and the availability of different molecular assays. Genetic counseling should therefore be addressed...
During the last decade, the availability of next-generation sequencing-based approaches has revealed the presence of microbial communities in almost all the human body, including the reproductive tract. As for other body sites, this resident microbio...
A genetically engineered chimeric virus crTMV-CP-PLRV composed of the crucifer-infecting tobacco mosaic virus (crTMV) RNA and the potato leafroll virus (PLRV) coat protein (CP) was obtained by agroinfiltration of Nicotiana benthamiana with the binary...
The increasing interest in metagenomics is enhancing our knowledge regarding the composition and role of the microbiota in human physiology and pathology. Indeed, microbes have been reported to play a role in several diseases, including infertility....
Epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), the major catechin present in green tea, presents diverse appealing biological activities, such as antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, and antiviral activities, among others. The present work evaluated...
The knowledge of genetic variants in genes involved in drug metabolism may be translated into reduction of adverse drug reactions, increase of efficacy, healthcare outcomes improvement and economic benefits. Many high-throughput tools are available f...
Over the past century, there has been a steady increase in the stool pH of infants from industrialized countries. Analysis of historical data revealed a strong association between abundance of Bifidobacterium in the gut microbiome of breasted infants...
Epigenetics is the interaction between the genome and environmental stimuli capable of influencing gene expression during development and aging. A large number of studies have shown that metabolic diseases are highly associated with epigenetic altera...
D-hydantoinases catalyze an enantioselective opening of 5- and 6-membered cyclic structures and therefore can be used for the production of optically pure precursors for biomedical applications. The thermostable D-hydantoinase from Geobacillus stearo...
Molecular profiling of a tumor allows the opportunity to design specific therapies which are able to interact only with cancer cells characterized by the accumulation of several genomic aberrations. This study investigates the usefulness of next-gene...
The increase in life expectancy during the 20th century ranks as one of society’s greatest achievements, with massive growth in the numbers and proportion of the elderly, virtually occurring in every country of the world. The burden of chronic...
The editorial team greatly appreciates the reviewers who have dedicated their considerable time and expertise to the journal’s rigorous editorial process over the past 12 months, regardless of whether the papers are finally published or not [...]
Next generation sequencing (NGS) provides a powerful tool in the field of medical genetics, allowing one to perform multi-gene analysis and to sequence entire exomes (WES), transcriptomes or genomes (WGS). The generated high-throughput data are parti...
The development of novel structural materials with increasing mechanical requirements is a very resource-intense process if conventional methods are used. While there are high-throughput methods for the development of functional materials, this is no...
The performance of software tools for de novo transcriptome assembly greatly depends on the selection of software parameters. Up to now, the development of de novo transcriptome assembly for prokaryotes has not been as remarkable as that for eukaryot...
Compared to traditional laboratory methods, spectroscopic techniques (e.g., near infrared, hyperspectral imaging) provide analysts with an innovative and improved understanding of complex issues by determining several chemical compounds and metabolit...
Studies in epitranscriptomics indicate that RNA is modified by a variety of enzymes. Among these RNA modifications, adenosine to inosine (A-to-I) RNA editing occurs frequently in the mammalian transcriptome. These RNA editing sites can be detected di...
Leonardite-based biostimulants are a large class of compounds, including humic acid substances. Foliar application of biostimulants at field level improves plant growth, yield and quality through metabolic changes and stimulation of plant proton pump...
Adductomics studies represent effective tools for providing additional insights into how exposure to reactive metabolites can underlie disease mechanisms. This special issue is focused not only on summarizing the analytical methodologies used for DNA...
Post-translational modifications (PTMs) are fundamental traits of protein functionality and their study has been addressed using several approaches over the past years. However, screening methods developed to detect regulators of PTMs imply many chal...
This paper studies the global stability of viral infection models with CTL immune impairment. We incorporate both productively and latently infected cells. The models integrate two routes of transmission, cell-to-cell and virus-to-cell. In the second...
There is a current need to develop and optimize new therapeutics for the treatment of dental caries, but these efforts are limited by the relatively low throughput of relevant in vitro models. The aim of this work was to bridge the 96-well microtiter...
The measurement of DNA adducts, the covalent modifications of DNA upon the exposure to the environmental and dietary genotoxicants and endogenously produced electrophiles, provides molecular evidence for DNA damage. With the recent improvements in th...
Isoprostane endoperoxides generated by free radical-induced oxidation of arachidonates, and prostaglandin endoperoxides generated through enzymatic cyclooxygenation of arachidonate, rearrange nonenzymatically to isoprostanes and a family of stereo an...
Screening of one-bead-one-compound (OBOC) libraries is a proven procedure for the identification of protein-binding ligands. The demand for binders with high affinity and specificity towards various targets has surged in the biomedical and pharmaceut...
Protein covalent adducts formed upon exposure to reactive (mainly electrophilic) chemicals may lead to the development of a wide range of deleterious health outcomes. Therefore, the identification of protein covalent adducts constitutes a huge opport...
The mercapturate pathway is a unique metabolic circuitry that detoxifies electrophiles upon adducts formation with glutathione. Since its discovery over a century ago, most of the knowledge on the mercapturate pathway has been provided from biomonito...
Peptide microarrays are a fast-developing field enabling the mapping of linear epitopes in the immune response to vaccinations or diseases and high throughput studying of protein-protein interactions. In this respect, a rapid label-free measurement o...
The dark proteome, as we define it, is the part of the proteome where 3D structure has not been observed either by homology modeling or by experimental characterization in the protein universe. From the 550.116 proteins available in Swiss-Prot (as of...
The reaction products of electrophiles in vivo can be measured as adducts to the abundant proteins, hemoglobin (Hb), and human serum albumin (HSA), in human blood samples. During the last decade, methods for untargeted screening of such adducts, call...
The neutrophilic component in bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS, the main form of chronic lung rejection), plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis and maintenance of the disorder. Human Neutrophil Elastase (HNE), a serine protease responsible o...
High-throughput technologies have been used to generate a large amount of omics data. In the past, single-level analysis has been extensively conducted where the omics measurements at different levels, including mRNA, microRNA, CNV and DNA methylatio...
Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high-quality academic publishing [...]
Novel sensing technologies for liquid biopsies offer promising prospects for the early detection of metabolic conditions through omics techniques. Indeed, high-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) facilities are routinely used for metabolomics inve...
In the need to characterise the genomic landscape of cancers and to establish novel biomarkers and therapeutic targets, studies have largely focused on the identification of driver mutations within the protein-coding gene regions, where the most path...
In the past decades, many efforts have been made to individualize medical treatments, taking into account molecular profiles and the individual genetic background. The development of molecularly targeted drugs and immunotherapy have revolutionized me...
Precision oncologic medicine is an emerging approach for cancer treatment that has recently taken giant steps in solid clinical practice. Recent advances in molecular diagnostics that can analyze the individual tumor’s variability in genes have...
The last few years have featured an increasing interest in the study of the human microbiome and its correlations with health status. Indeed, technological advances have allowed the study of microbial communities to reach a previously unthinkable sen...
Beta-lactam resistant bacteria, which are commonly resident in tertiary hospitals, have emerged as a worldwide health problem because of ready-to-eat vegetable intake. We aimed to characterize the genes that provide resistance to beta-lactam antibiot...
We present a novel approach for the molecular transformation and analysis of patient clinical phenotypes. Building on the fact that drugs perturb the function of targets/genes, we integrated data from 8.2 million clinical reports detailing drug-induc...
We model the transmission of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) by six differential equations that represent the reactions between HBV with DNA-containing capsids, the hepatocytes, the antibodies and the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) cells. The intracellular...
In the last decade, it has been demonstrated that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are involved in cancer development. The great majority of studies on lncRNAs report alterations, principally on their expression profiles, in several tumor types with re...
Integration of multi-omics data from different molecular levels with clinical data, as well as epidemiologic risk factors, represents an accurate and promising methodology to understand the complexity of biological systems of human diseases, includin...
Meningitis is commonly caused by infection with a variety of bacterial or viral pathogens. Acute bacterial meningitis (ABM) can cause severe disease, which can progress rapidly to a critical life-threatening condition. Rapid diagnosis of ABM is criti...
An alarming increase in tuberculosis (TB) caused by drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis has created an urgent need for new antituberculosis drugs acting via novel mechanisms. Phylogenomic and comparative genomic analyses reviewed her...
CTCF (CCCTC-binding factor) is a transcription regulator with hundreds of binding sites in the human genome. It has a main function as an insulator protein, defining together with cohesins the boundaries of areas of the genome called topologically as...
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