Publications by authors named "Adriana Lorenzi"

Cyanobacteria, often overlooked in traditional agriculture, are gaining recognition for their roles in enhancing plant growth and soil health through diverse mechanisms. This review examines their multifaceted contributions to agricultural systems, highlighting their proficiency in auxin production, which promotes plant growth and development. Additionally, we examined cyanobacteria's ability to produce siderophores that enhance iron absorption and address micronutrient deficiencies, as well as their capacity for nitrogen fixation, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into a form that plants can utilize, all with the goal of reducing reliance on synthetic fertilizers.

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Irrigation of crops with cyanotoxin-contaminated water poses a significant risk to human health. The direct phytotoxic effects of microcystin-LR (MC-LR), one of the most toxic and prevalent microcystin variants in water bodies, can induce physiological stress and hinder crop development and production. This study investigated the impact of environmentally relevant concentrations of MC-LR (1 to 10 µg L) on photosynthetic parameters and antioxidant response of lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.

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This review provides a comprehensive overview of the key aspects of the natural metabolite production by endophytic fungi, which has attracted significant attention due to its diverse biological activities and wide range of applications. Synthesized by various fungal species, these metabolites encompass compounds with therapeutic, agricultural, and commercial significance. We delved into strategies and advancements aimed at optimizing fungal metabolite production.

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Elucidating the complex relationship between plants and endophytic fungi is very important in order to understand the maintenance of biodiversity, equity, stability, and ecosystem functioning. However, knowledge about the diversity of endophytic fungi from species of the native Brazilian Cerrado biome is poorly documented and remains largely unknown. These gaps led us to characterize the diversity of Cerrado endophytic foliar fungi associated with six woody species (, , , , , and ).

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Microcystins are produced by multifaceted organisms called cyanobacteria, which are integral to Africa's freshwater environments. The excessive proliferation of cyanobacteria caused by rising temperature and eutrophication leads to the production and release of copious amounts of microcystins, requiring critical management and control approaches to prevent the adverse environmental and public health problems associated with these bioactive metabolites. Despite hypotheses reported to explain the phylogeography and mechanisms responsible for cyanobacterial blooms in aquatic water bodies, many aspects are scarcely understood in Africa due to the paucity of investigations and lack of uniformity of experimental methods.

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Multifaceted microorganisms such as the bacterium colonize a wide range of habitats and can exhibit both beneficial and harmful behaviors, which provide new insights into microbial ecology. In the agricultural context, several strains of spp. can promote plant growth through direct or indirect mechanisms.

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Endophytic fungi are microorganisms that colonize the interior of plant tissues (e.g. leaves, seeds, stem, trunk, roots, fruits, flowers) in intracellular and/or extracellular spaces without causing symptoms of disease in host plants.

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Cerrado is the second largest biome in Brazil, and it is known for harboring a wide variety of endemic plant and microbial species, among which are endophytic fungi. Endophytic fungi are microorganisms capable of colonizing the interior of plant tissues without causing disease in host plants. Especially in the Cerrado biome, this group of microorganisms is still poorly studied and information on species estimation, ecological and evolutionary importance is not accurate and remains unknown.

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Sphaerospermopsis aphanizomenoides is a filamentous nitrogen-fixing and bloom-forming cyanobacterium, which biomass can fertilize natural water with nutrients, especially through nitrogen fixation. The Sphaerospermopsis aphanizomenoides strain BCCUSP55 was previously isolated from a water supply reservoir in the Brazilian semiarid region, and its draft genome assembly coupled with the gene contents are reported here. The obtained BCCUSP55 draft genome comprised 254 scaffolds with a genome size estimated of 6,096,273 bp.

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Human and veterinary pharmaceuticals either in the form of un-metabolized, incompletely metabolized, and metabolized drugs are increasingly present in aquatic ecosystems. These active pharmaceutical ingredients from pharmaceutical industries, hospitals, agricultural, and domestic discharges find their way into water systems - where they adversely affect non-target organisms like phytoplankton. Different aspects of phytoplankton life; ranging from growth, reproduction, morphology, physiology, biochemical composition, oxidative response, proteomics, and transcriptomics are altered by pharmaceuticals.

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Background: Nanoparticles (NPs) are a group of particles with at least one dimension ranging from 1 nm to 100 nm in diameter and a surrounding interfacial layer. The NP-protein interactions include covalent and non-covalent bonds. Several dehydrogenase enzymes (e.

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Microcystins (MCs) are the most studied toxins of cyanobacteria in freshwater bodies worldwide. However, they are poorly documented in coastal waters in several parts of the world. In this study, we investigated the composition of cyanobacteria and the presence of microcystins (MCs) in several coastal aquatic ecosystems of Nigeria.

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Objectives: Genotyping HPV from samples tested positive to careHPV™ assay in rural and remote areas of Brazilian territory.

Methods: A total of 5079 women were enrolled in an opportunistic screening from the Barretos Cancer Hospital, through mobile units or ambulatory unit. All careHPV™ hr-HPV positive samples were tested by a Luminex-based protocol in order to evaluate the HPV infecting types.

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Next-generation DNA sequencing technology was applied to generate molecular data from semiarid reservoirs during well-defined seasons. Target sequences of 16S-23S rRNA ITS and cpcBA-IGS were used to reveal the taxonomic groups of cyanobacteria present in the samples, and genes coding for cyanotoxins such as microcystins (mcyE), saxitoxins (sxtA), and cylindrospermopsins (cyrJ) were investigated. The presence of saxitoxins in the environmental samples was evaluated using ELISA kit.

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There has been an increase in the incidence of anal cancer in the past two decades, with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) being the most frequent histological type identified. Among the risk factors, high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the most pervasive. Raf kinase inhibitor protein (RKIP) is expressed in a number of normal human tissues and previous studies have demonstrated the prognostic value of the loss of RKIP expression in several gastrointestinal tumors.

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Unlabelled: The aim of the study was to evaluate the performance of the HPV-HR test to detect high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) in urine samples in comparison with a commercial molecular HPV test.

Materials And Methods: This is a prospective study, in which 350 patients diagnosed previously with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) grade 2 or higher were enrolled. Urine and cervical specimens were collected.

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Objective: To compare the results of cervical cytology and high-risk HPV tests using samples obtained using two different collection modalities in a population of Brazilian women: self-collection (vaginal lavage) and cervical Pap testing.

Methods: We enrolled 204 women who were aged 18-64 years and had previously obtained abnormal cervical cytology test results; 83.8% of them agreed to participate.

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The present study aimed to ascertain the significance of topoisomerase II α (TOP2A) and minichromosome maintenance protein (MCM) 2 expression in anal carcinoma. A total of 75 anal lesions were retrieved from the files of the Department of Pathology of Barretos Cancer Hospital (Barretos, Brazil) in order to verify the human papillomavirus (HPV) statuses of these lesions and characterize the immunohistochemical expression levels of TOP2A and MCM2 in anal carcinoma, as these are important markers for cervical HPV-induced lesions; their expression was also compared with respect to p16 and Ki-67. The vast majority of the cases tested positive for HPV16 (84%); 1 case tested positive for both HPV16 and HPV18.

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Growing evidence suggests that some bioactive metabolites (e.g. cyanotoxins) produced by cyanobacteria have allelopathic potential, due to their inhibitory or stimulatory effects on competing species.

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Persistent human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is a key event in HPV-induced carcinogenesis. As part of the prospective Finnish Family HPV Study, we analysed the physical state and viral copy numbers of HPV16 in asymptomatic oral infections that either persisted or cleared during the 6-year follow-up. The persister group comprised 14 women and 7 men with 51 and 21 HPV16-positive brush samples.

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Objective: To evaluate the reproducibility and accuracy of the HPV16/18-E6 test.

Methods: The study population was comprised of 448 women with a previously abnormal Pap who were referred to the Barretos Cancer Hospital (Brazil) for diagnosis and treatment. Two cervical samples were collected immediately before colposcopy, one for the hr-HPV-DNA test and cytology and the other for the HPV16/18-E6 test using high-affinity monoclonal antibodies (mAb).

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Due to changing global climatic conditions, a lot of attention has been given to cyanobacteria and their bioactive secondary metabolites. These conditions are expected to increase the frequency of cyanobacterial blooms, and consequently, the concentrations of cyanotoxins in aquatic ecosystems. Unfortunately, there are very few studies that address the effects of cyanotoxins on the physiology of phytoplankton species under different environmental conditions.

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Anal cancer is a rare type of digestive tract disease, which has had a crescent incidence in a number of regions. Carcinomas are most frequently found, with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) comprising ~95% of all anal tumors. The major risk factor for development of this type of tumor is human papillomavirus (HPV) infection.

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Cylindrospermopsis raciborskii ITEP-A1 is a saxitoxin-producing cyanobacterium. We report the draft genome sequence of ITEP-A1, which comprised 195 contigs that were assembled with SPAdes and annotated with Rapid Annotation using Subsystem Technology. The identified genome sequence had 3,605,836 bp, 40.

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Background: Human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing can be crucial for women who have limited access to traditional screening. The current study compared the results obtained through HPV DNA testing with those obtained through cytology-based screening.

Methods: A total of 3068 women aged 18 to 85 years were enrolled in an opportunistic cervical cancer screening program developed by the Barretos Cancer Hospital and performed by a team of health professionals working within a mobile unit from March to December 2012, followed by statistical analyses.

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