Search Results (1,792)

Background: Epilepsy is a chronic disorder with a higher prevalence in low- and middle-income countries. ATP-binding cassette superfamily B1 (ABCB1) not only has a potential influence on the resistance to antiepileptic drugs but also plays a possible role in the occurrence of epilepsy. Purpose: To evaluate the association of ABCB1 polymorphisms, c.1236C>T (rs1128503), c.2677G>T (rs2032582), and c.3435C>T (rs1045642), with epilepsy susceptibility in a Jordanian cohort. Subjects and methods: Eighty-six cases of patients with epilepsy were analyzed using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for ABCB1 c.1236C>T, c.2677G>T, and c.3435C>T gene variants. The proportions of genotypes and alleles in the epilepsy group were compared with one hundred healthy controls who were previously also analyzed by PCR. Results: The C alleles of the ABCB1 polymorphisms c.1236C>T and c.3435C>T were more prevalent in the epilepsy group than in controls. The patients with epilepsy were less likely to have the TT genotype compared with controls (concerning ABCB1 c.1236C>T) (OR_{TT vs. CC} = 0.42; 95% CI = [0.19–0.91]; p = 0.019). The CC genotype of ABCB1 c.3435C>T was more frequent in epileptics than healthy people (OR_{CC vs. TT} = 4.3; 95% CI = [1.8–9.95]; p = 0.0007). No significant difference in ABCB1 c.2677G>T allelic and genotypic frequencies was observed between epileptic cases and healthy volunteers. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that ABCB1 c.1236C>T and c.3435C>T variants were associated with epilepsy susceptibility in this Jordanian cohort, whereas no significant association was observed for c.2677G>T. These findings should be interpreted cautiously because of the modest sample size and require validation in larger, independent studies. Full article

Background: Breast cancer (BC) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide and a major public health concern in Mexico. Regulatory variants in KRAS, particularly within the 3′UTR and intronic regions, may influence gene expression through microRNA binding and transcriptional regulation. Methods: Five regulatory single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in KRAS (rs12228277, rs1137196, rs8720, rs12587, and rs12245) were genotyped in BC patients and cancer-free controls. Associations were evaluated using odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs), adjusting for age, alcohol, and tobacco use. Multiple testing was corrected using the Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR). Linkage disequilibrium (LD), multilocus combinations, and in silico functional analyses were also performed. Results: Variants rs12228277, rs1137196, rs8720, and rs12245 showed significant genotype-level associations with BC susceptibility, all remaining significant after FDR correction (pFDR < 0.05). No clinicopathological associations remained significant after correction in single-variant analyses. Multilocus analysis identified specific high-risk combinations (e.g., involving rs12228277, rs1137196, and rs8720) associated with increased BC susceptibility. At the nominal level, these combinations showed associations with clinicopathological features, including hormone receptor–positive status (PR and ER), proliferation markers, and Luminal B subtype; however, none remained significant after FDR correction. LD analysis indicated weak linkage among variants. In silico analyses suggested potential regulatory effects on microRNA binding and KRAS expression. Conclusions: Regulatory variants in KRAS are associated with BC susceptibility through independent effects and potential combinatorial patterns. These findings support the relevance of non-coding variation in cancer risk and warrant further functional and replication studies. Full article

Agrivoltaic systems co-locate photovoltaic (PV) arrays and crops, offering land-use efficiency and potential microclimate benefits, yet they introduce new challenges for computer-vision-based crop monitoring. PV structures produce strong, spatially varying shadows, specular reflections, and periodic occlusions that confound visual cues for diagnosing crop diseases and abiotic stresses. Meanwhile, agrivoltaic deployments are often distributed across farms and operators, making centralized data collection impractical due to privacy, ownership, and regulatory concerns. This paper proposes PrivAgriVolt, a novel privacy-preserving learning framework for agrivoltaic crop issue recognition that explicitly models PV-induced illumination and enables collaborative training without sharing raw images. The core algorithm integrates (i) a PV-geometry-conditioned shadow normalization module that fuses estimated array layout and sun-angle priors into a shadow-aware appearance canonization network, reducing illumination-induced domain shift across times and sites; (ii) a federated contrastive stress learner that aligns stress semantics across farms via prototype-based contrastive objectives while remaining robust to heterogeneous sensors and crop stages; and (iii) an adaptive privacy layer that combines secure aggregation with budget-aware gradient perturbation and client-level clipping to provide formal privacy guarantees while preserving fine-grained diagnostic performance. Extensive experiments on real agricultural vision benchmarks and agrivoltaic shadow variants demonstrate that PrivAgriVolt improves stress recognition and segmentation under PV shading while maintaining strong privacy–utility trade-offs. Full article

Despite their vital physiological roles, oxidative imbalance caused by reactive oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, and chlorine species damages essential body macromolecules such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids through oxidative stress. This stress is strongly associated with cancer, inflammation, neurological and cardiovascular disorders, and other chronic human diseases. Therefore, antioxidants, natural or synthetic, that counteract oxidative damage are important, with increasing interest in their use within the pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetic industries. However, due to toxicity concerns with the synthetic variants, natural antioxidants are increasingly preferred. Extremophile-derived antioxidants, such as superoxide dismutases, catalases, peroxidases, carotenoids, and melanin, are of renewed interest due to their remarkable stability, robustness, and potency under extreme conditions of temperature, pH, and salinity. These make them better than many mesophile-derived antioxidants and excellent candidates for cost-effective biotechnological, research, and industrial processes that require high operational efficiency. This review summarises key classes of selected enzymatic and pigment antioxidants, their mechanisms of action, and their industrial relevance, with a focus on extremophilic microalgae, bacteria, and fungi. The benefits of extremophilic antioxidants are discussed alongside their current applications and existing challenges, including the need to develop efficient delivery systems, scalability issues, and limited characterisation. Full article

Members of the genus Brucella are bacterial pathogens of global importance, and their increasing detection in marine mammals has raised concerns for wildlife conservation and public health. In this study, we evaluated the biological and pathogenic characteristics of two Brucella sp. sequence type 27 (ST27) isolates obtained from a dwarf sperm whale (Kogia sima). We compared them with terrestrial and marine Brucella reference strains. We assessed resistance to polymyxin B and human serum complement, intracellular infection dynamics in HeLa epithelial cells, persistence in a murine model, and associated hematological and histopathological changes, and analyzed lipopolysaccharide (LPS) profiles. The Kogia isolates exhibited resistance to polymyxin B and serum complement, comparable to that of B. abortus 2308W and marine mammal Brucella strains. In HeLa cells, the isolates displayed distinct, strain-specific intracellular infection dynamics. In the murine model, both isolates persisted in the spleen and induced granulomatous lesions. However, splenic bacterial loads and histopathological scores were generally lower than those observed with B. abortus 2308W, which exhibited the highest virulence among the strains evaluated. Hematological alterations associated with Kogia isolates were also less pronounced than those induced by B. abortus 2308W, indicating an intermediate and strain-dependent virulence phenotype without evidence of enhanced virulence relative to the terrestrial reference strain. Western blot analyses showed that Brucella sp. ST27 isolates were not recognized by anti-B. abortus or anti-O-antigen monoclonal antibodies, while exhibiting a distinct recognition pattern with anti-B. canis serum, indicating differences in surface antigen composition. Comparative whole-genome analysis identified a limited number of isolate-specific variants affecting coding and intergenic regions. Collectively, these findings highlight phenotypic and genetic features of Brucella sp. ST27 from Kogia sima, which distinguishes it from other marine and terrestrial Brucella strains and supports further investigation into its biological behavior and potential public health relevance. Full article

High-density apple (Malus domestica Borkh.) orchards yield fruits as early as three years after planting but nutrient inputs and availability are paramount to a successful orchard; sustainable practices that balance tree growth and production with environmental concerns are not widely available. In this three-year study, we implemented a split-plot design in three orchards across the Mid-Atlantic region of the USA to evaluate integrated soil management approaches that combine locally sourced carbon-based organic mulch with fertilizers on rhizosphere microbes and tree growth. Bacterial and fungal communities were sampled at the end of the first and third growing seasons in addition to soil and tree-related physicochemical properties. Mulch treatment showed the most significant effect on both the bacterial and fungal groups. Most of these changes reflect the increase in soil organic matter and the increase in carbon cycling. Sequence variants belonging to Flavobacteria and Cytophaga were enriched by the mulch application. A key result from this project is the suppression of the relative abundance of potential soil-borne plant fungal pathogens in all orchards in all years. Additionally, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi were enriched under the mulch treatment. Microbial shifts accompanying the mulch treatments supported higher trunk cross-sectional areas by the third sampling year that increased by 33.5%. Fertilizer treatments had less pronounced effects on microbial communities. These results highlight the potential for using sustainable, integrated nutrient management strategies to promote healthy orchard soils and support vigorous tree growth while reducing fungal pathogens. Our work will contribute to regional and location-specific fertilizer recommendations for apple producers. Full article

Microplastics represent an emerging threat to aquatic ecosystems, human health, and coastal aesthetics, with increasing concern about their accumulation on beaches due to ocean currents, wave action, and accidental spills. Despite their environmental impact, current methods for detecting and quantifying microplastics remain largely manual, time-consuming, and spatially limited. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based approach for the semantic segmentation of microplastics on sandy beaches, enabling pixel-level localization of small particles under real-world conditions. Twelve segmentation models were evaluated, including U-Net and its variants (Attention U-Net, ResUNet), as well as state-of-the-art architectures such as LinkNet, PAN, PSPNet, and YOLOv11 with segmentation heads. Models were trained and tested on augmented data patches, and their performance was assessed using Intersection over Union (IoU) and Dice coefficient metrics. LinkNet achieved the best performance with a Dice coefficient of 80% and an IoU of 72.6% on the test set, showing superior capability in segmenting microplastics even in the presence of visual clutter such as debris or sand variation. Qualitative results support the quantitative findings, highlighting the robustness of the model in complex scenes. Full article

The subject concerns the determination of activation energy under dynamic conditions using two theoretical isothermal models, and subsequently experimental data, with reference to the α–T relationship matrix. In recent years, the Vyazovkin method, classified as one of the isoconversional variants, has gained the greatest recognition. Comparison was made between two isothermal models of the thermal dissociation of calcite, which in chronological terms are associated with a kinetic–nucleation reaction/process (the H-CL, as a kinetic model) and a kinetic–desorption reaction/process (the V, as a thermodynamic model). A comparison of numerical values, understood as the logarithm of the reaction/process rate with respect to temperature, shows correspondence in the temperature range up to the equilibrium temperature. The H-CL model is characterized by a strong dominance of the nucleation process relative to the chemical reaction, whereas the V model exhibits a certain type of balance resulting from the course of the chemical decomposition reaction combined with the transformation of a metastable oxide into a crystalline form. It was confirmed that both models describe the same phenomenon within the transformation process, which implies that for a constant conversion degree, the proportions of the chemical reaction and the physical process vary. Pointwise with increasing temperature, the H-CL model leads to a minimum activation energy E → 0, whereas the V model reaches a negative activation energy E < 0. In both cases, the apparent activation energy summed over the process is constant, and the assigned conversion degree, treated as isoconversional, remains fixed and corresponds to the assumed activation energy of the completed reaction/process. Several simple methods for its determination under dynamic/isoconversion conditions are used. Full article

Background: Arterial hypertension in childhood is an increasing health concern, often associated with structural and functional cardiovascular or renal alterations. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and type of non-stenotic renal artery anatomical variants in children with systemic hypertension and to assess their possible association with cardiac involvement. Methods: A total of 107 children and adolescents with hypertension (mean age 15.4 ± 2.7 years) were evaluated. Hypertension was defined as blood pressure persistently above the 95th percentile for over one year, confirmed by 24 h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. Patients with known secondary causes were excluded. All underwent renal vascular imaging by CT or MRI and echocardiographic assessment of left ventricular morphology and function. Results: Renal artery anatomical variants were found in 69 of 107 patients (65%), mainly unilateral or bilateral accessory polar arteries. Other anomalies found (left renal vein narrowing or duplication, severe left renal artery stenosis) were excluded from the statistical analysis. Normal renal vasculature was observed in only 32%. Left ventricular hypertrophy was detected in 41%, highlighting a significant prevalence of target-organ involvement. No statistically significant differences were found in terms of hypertension or hypertrophy between patients with renal artery anatomical variants and those without. However, patients with renal anomalies more frequently required dual antihypertensive therapy (p = 0.025). Conclusions: Renal artery anatomical variants, even in the absence of overt stenosis, may contribute to the pathogenesis of pediatric hypertension and complicate its management. Systematic evaluation of renal vasculature should be considered in the diagnostic workup to improve risk stratification and guide management strategies. Full article

The discovery of novel anti-infective agents is a continuous challenge in medicinal chemistry, particularly due to the rise in resistant fungal and viral strains. Within this context, the biphenyl subunit has been identified as a highly versatile privileged structure capable of interacting with diverse protein targets via hydrophobic and π-interactions. The purpose of this study is to review the pharmacological potential of biphenyl-based compounds, focusing on their application as anti-infective agents. We comprehensively analyzed recent literature and rational design strategies concerning biphenyl derivatives, examining structure-activity relationships, molecular docking insights, and structural optimizations aimed at enhancing both pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics. The reviewed studies demonstrate that incorporating biphenyl moieties yields compounds with potent antifungal and antiviral activities. Specifically, optimized biphenyl derivatives exhibit strong inhibitory effects against resistant Candida strains and crucial viral targets, including mutant variants of the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and protease enzymes. Furthermore, strategic modifications, such as scaffold hopping and the introduction of specific substituents, successfully mitigated cytotoxicity and improved metabolic stability against cytochrome P450 enzymes. Biphenyl serves as a robust and adaptable scaffold for drug design. Its rational structural optimization provides a viable pathway to overcome drug resistance and develop effective, metabolically stable anti-infective therapeutics. Full article

The perception that hormonal contraception causes weight gain is a general belief that frequently hinders the initiation and continuation of effective family planning. This narrative review analyses data from Cochrane systematic reviews and recent pharmacogenomic studies to separate patient perception from metabolic reality. Analysis of high-quality data, including Cochrane systematic reviews, indicates that the association between Combined Hormonal Contraceptives (CHCs)—including oral pills, the transdermal patch, and the vaginal ring—and weight gain is not supported by consistent high-quality evidence. Placebo-controlled trials demonstrate that these methods are weight-neutral on average. Perceived weight increases in CHC users are likely mediated in part by fluid retention linked to the estrogenic stimulation of the Renin–Angiotensin–Aldosterone System (RAAS), rather than adipose tissue accumulation. Conversely, Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate (DMPA) represents a verified clinical risk for weight gain, showing a demonstrated clinical association with significant fat mass accumulation. Hypothesized biological mechanisms for this increase include hypothalamic appetite stimulation and glucocorticoid-like activity. The etonogestrel implant occupies a complex middle ground. While population-level data suggests weight neutrality, recent exploratory pharmacogenomic research has identified a specific variant in the Estrogen Receptor 1 (ESR1) gene. For the minority of women carrying this variant, the implant may trigger clinically significant weight gain, suggesting a biological basis for their subjective experience despite statistical evidence. Ultimately, the persistence of the weight gain concern is fueled by the nocebo effect and the misattribution of natural age-related weight trajectories to contraceptive use. Full article

Salmonella enterica remains a major food safety concern in poultry, and processing-related stress can influence its survival and persistence. This study evaluated the phenotypic expression of S. enterica serotypes Kentucky (SK), Infantis (SI), Schwarzengrund (SS), and Typhimurium (ST) following antimicrobial and temperature stressors. A pre-harvest isolate of each serotype was gradually exposed to increasing concentrations of peracetic acid (PAA) and quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), starting at 40 ppm and 1 ppm, respectively, until minimum inhibitory and bactericidal concentrations (MICs/MBCs) were established. Stressed cells were then subjected to cold (4 °C, 60 min) and heat (55 °C, 6 min) shock and assessed for sanitizer tolerance, biofilm formation and recovery, and antibiotic resistance. Sanitizer tolerance after daily conditioning varied among S. enterica serotypes, with ST and SK showing the highest tolerance to PAA and QACs, respectively. The tolerance of PAA variants increased by 10–20 ppm and QAC variants by 2–8 ppm following stress exposure. The double-stressed variants of ST significantly (p < 0.05) formed more biofilm than the control after PAA, whereas no significant differences were observed among the variants for other serotypes. Biofilm recovery was higher for the stressed variants of SI and SS (p < 0.05) following PAA stress but remained the same across all serotypes after QAC stress. QAC-stressed variants showed more phenotypic changes across the antibiotics tested. Notably, the stressed variants of SK, SS, and ST displayed increased MICs, including a 2- to 4-fold rise in azithromycin for the SK and ST variants. There was an increase in the MICs of ceftriaxone and nalidixic acid for some SK and SS variants. These findings suggest that environmental stress can significantly enhance the tolerance, survival, and persistence of S. enterica. Full article

Background: In recent years, the severity of COVID-19 has diminished. However, some patients progressed to respiratory failure, necessitating intubation and mechanical ventilation. This study investigated the impact of variants of concern and vaccination status on mortality in mechanically ventilated patients. Method: We conducted a retrospective analysis of the medical records of intubated COVID-19 patients from 1 January 2021, to 31 December 2023. Patients who received at least one dose of a vaccine were classified as vaccinated, and variant types were classified based on the dominant variant reported by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control. The primary outcome measured was time from intubation to all-cause in-hospital death. Result: A total of 254 patients were analyzed, comprising 65 patients infected with the Alpha variant and 189 with the Omicron variant. Clinical data, including variant type, vaccination status, and SOFA score at the time of intubation, were meticulously recorded. The overall mortality rate was 40%, with two epidemic surges occurring in 2021 and 2022. Infection with the Alpha variant was associated with a significantly higher risk of mortality (adjusted hazard ratio = 5.42 (2.78–10.7); p < 0.01). Key prognostic factors identified included age, body mass index, SOFA score, and serum bicarbonate levels. Conclusions: The overall mortality rate remained notably high. The study identified several factors associated with increased mortality risk, including older age, higher SOFA scores, Alpha variant infection, decreased serum bicarbonate levels, and lower BMI. However, vaccination status was not a significant prognostic indicator. Full article

Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa Korth.) has gained increasing global attention due to its traditional use, psychoactive properties, and emerging therapeutic potential; however, concerns regarding adulteration, substitution, and inconsistent quality of commercial products necessitate robust authentication strategies. This study aimed to integrate DNA barcoding and comprehensive chemical profiling to authenticate kratom variants and discriminate them from closely allied Mitragyna species for quality control and forensic applications. Nine DNA barcoding regions were analyzed, alongside chemical characterization using UHPLC, GC–MS, and LC–MS/QTOF. Among the tested loci, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and ITS2 regions exhibited the highest interspecific variation and effectively distinguished kratom from allied species. UHPLC and GC–MS analyses confirmed that mitragynine was exclusively detected in kratom variants, with Kan Khiao exhibiting the highest content (94.33 ± 0.14 mg/g) when quantified against the mitragynine standard using UHPLC analysis. LC–MS/QTOF profiling revealed an alkaloid-rich chemotype in kratom dominated by mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, whereas M. diversifolia, M. hirsuta, and M. rotundifolia showed distinct profiles enriched in phenolic acids and flavonoid glycosides. Multivariate analyses further identified procyanidin B1, datiscetin-3-O-rutinoside, mitragynine, and 7-hydroxymitragynine as key discriminatory markers. Overall, the combined molecular and chemical workflow provides a robust framework for kratom authentication, supporting regulatory monitoring, quality assurance, and forensic identification of kratom materials. Full article

Personality recognition and emotion recognition, two core tasks within affective computing, are fundamentally constrained by data scarcity as collecting and annotating human behavioral data is expensive and restricted by privacy concerns. Under these limited data conditions, existing models tend to rely on superficial shortcut features such as background appearance, lighting conditions, or color variations, rather than behavior-relevant cues including facial expressions, posture, and motion dynamics. To address this issue, we propose Style-Abstraction-based Data Augmentation, a style transfer-based augmentation strategy that reduces dependency on low-level appearance information while preserving high-level semantic cues. Specifically, we employ cartoonization to generate stylized variants of training videos that retain expressive characteristics but remove stylistic bias. We validate our approach on three diverse personality benchmarks (First Impression v2, UDIVA v0.5, and KETI) and emotion benchmark(Emotion Dataset) using state-of-the-art models including ViViT (Video Vision Transformer), TimeSformer, and VST (Video Swin Transformer). Our experiments indicate that increasing the proportion of style-abstracted data in the training set can improve performance on the evaluated datasets. Notably, our method yields consistent gains across all benchmarks: a 0.0893 reduction in MSE on UDIVA v0.5 (with VST), a 0.0023 improvement in 1-MAE on KETI (with TimeSformer), and a 0.0051 improvement on First Impression v2 (with TimeSformer). Furthermore, extending style-abstraction-based data augmentation to a four-class categorical emotion recognition task demonstrates similar performance gains, achieving up to a 3.44% accuracy increase with the TimeSformer backbone. These findings verify that our style-abstraction-based data augmentation facilitates learning of behavior-relevant features by reducing reliance on superficial shortcuts. Overall, cartoonization-based style abstraction for data augmentation functions as both an effective augmentation strategy and a regularization mechanism, encouraging the model to learn more stable and generalizable representations for affective computing applications. Full article