Perceptions and Experiences of Primary Care Providers on Their Role in Tobacco Treatment Delivery Based on Their Smoking Status: A Qualitative Study.

Introduction: Despite the well-documented benefits of smoking cessation interventions, the implementation and success of these programs in primary care settings often encounter significant barriers. A primary care provider's personal smoking status has been identified as a potential barrier to tobacco treatment delivery. The aim of this qualitative study is to explore the experiences and perspectives of primary care providers regarding their role in delivering smoking cessation interventions to patients based on their personal smoking status.

Parental Hesitancy towards the Established Childhood Vaccination Programmes in the COVID-19 Era: Assessing the Drivers of a Challenging Public Health Concern.

(1) Background: Vaccine hesitancy remains a major public health concern. The reasons behind this attitude are complex and warrant careful consideration, especially in the context of the COVID-19 era. The purpose of this study was to estimate vaccine hesitancy towards the established childhood immunization programmes in a non-random sample of Greek parents and explore possible links with important drivers of this phenomenon.

Increase of breast-feeding in the past decade in Greece, but still low uptake: cross-sectional studies in 2007 and 2017.

Objective: To estimate breast-feeding prevalence in Greece in 2007 and 2017, compare breast-feeding indicators and maternity hospital practices between these years, and investigate breast-feeding determinants.

Design: Two national cross-sectional studies (2007 and 2017) using systematic cluster sampling of babies with the same sampling design, data collection and analysis methodology.

Setting: Telephone interview with babies' mothers or fathers.

Imaging Features of Multiple Myeloma Extramedullary Lesions in the Liver with 18F-FDG PET/CT, Contrast-Enhanced CT and MRI.

Ηepatic involvement in multiple myeloma is not common; nevertheless, it is associated with poorer outcome. Heterogeneous features have been described in few published reports so far. We present the imaging findings of PET/CT in comparison to those of MRI for two multiple myeloma (MM) patients, one with a liver lesion suspicious for myeloma metastasis on PET and one with multiple liver lesions suspicious for myeloma metastases on MRΙ.

Adverse effect of the financial crisis in Greece on perinatal factors.

Background: Starting in 2008 recession affected many European countries and especially Greece. Previous studies have reported increases in low birth weight, preterm birth and stillbirth rates in Greece during early crisis. In our study we used data on births from 1980 to 2014 that allowed us to distinguish recent changes, which could possibly be attributed to the financial crisis, from long term trends, and controlled for maternal age and country of origin as potential confounders.

[Neuroendocrine tumors: Peptide receptors radionuclide therapy (PRRT)].

Neuroendocrine tumors (neuroendocrine tumors-NET) are a heterogeneous group of neoplasms with a common embryological origin and diverse biological behavior, derived from cells of the neuroendocrine system, the system APUD (amine precursor uptake and decarboxylation). They are characterized by overexpression of all five somatostatin receptors (SSTR1-SSTR5), particularly type 2 (SST2). Surgical resection of the tumor is the treatment option, with a possibility of complete remission in patients with limited disease.

Codon Context Optimization in Synthetic Gene Design.

Advances in de novo synthesis of DNA and computational gene design methods make possible the customization of genes by direct manipulation of features such as codon bias and mRNA secondary structure. Codon context is another feature significantly affecting mRNA translational efficiency, but existing methods and tools for evaluating and designing novel optimized protein coding sequences utilize untested heuristics and do not provide quantifiable guarantees on design quality. In this study we examine statistical properties of codon context measures in an effort to better understand the phenomenon.

Interventions to increase seasonal influenza vaccine coverage in healthcare workers: A systematic review and meta-regression analysis.

Influenza vaccination is recommended for healthcare workers (HCWs), but coverage is often low. We reviewed studies evaluating interventions to increase seasonal influenza vaccination coverage in HCWs, including a meta-regression analysis to quantify the effect of each component. Fourty-six eligible studies were identified.

Computational tools and algorithms for designing customized synthetic genes.

Advances in DNA synthesis have enabled the construction of artificial genes, gene circuits, and genomes of bacterial scale. Freedom in de novo design of synthetic constructs provides significant power in studying the impact of mutations in sequence features, and verifying hypotheses on the functional information that is encoded in nucleic and amino acids. To aid this goal, a large number of software tools of variable sophistication have been implemented, enabling the design of synthetic genes for sequence optimization based on rationally defined properties.

Rational design of orthogonal libraries of protein coding genes.

Array-based oligonucleotide synthesis technologies provide access to thousands of custom-designed sequence variants at low cost. Large-scale synthesis and high-throughput assays have become valuable experimental tools to study in detail the interplay between sequence and function. We have developed a methodology and corresponding algorithms for the design of diverse protein coding gene libraries, to exploit the potential of multiplex synthesis and help elucidate the effects of codon utilization and other factors in gene expression.

Ecosystem approach to water resources management using the MIKE 11 modeling system in the Strymonas River and Lake Kerkini.

The ability to apply an ecosystem approach to the Strymonas River catchment was investigated using the MIKE 11 modeling system for the simulation of surface water. The Strymonas River catchment is shared mainly between Bulgaria and Greece. The river feeds the artificial Lake Kerkini, a significant wetland ecosystem, and further downstream it outflows to the Gulf of Strymonikos, whose estuary ecosystem is very important for fisheries, biodiversity and tourism.

Designed reduction of Streptococcus pneumoniae pathogenicity via synthetic changes in virulence factor codon-pair bias.

In this study, we used a previously described method of controlling gene expression with computer-based gene design and de novo DNA synthesis to attenuate the virulence of Streptococcus pneumoniae. We produced 2 S. pneumoniae serotype 3 (SP3) strains in which the pneumolysin gene (ply) was recoded with underrepresented codon pairs while retaining its amino acid sequence and determined their ply expression and pneumolysin production in vitro and their virulence in a mouse pulmonary infection model.

Live attenuated influenza virus vaccines by computer-aided rational design.

Despite existing vaccines and enormous efforts in biomedical research, influenza annually claims 250,000-500,000 lives worldwide, motivating the search for new, more effective vaccines that can be rapidly designed and easily produced. We applied the previously described synthetic attenuated virus engineering (SAVE) approach to influenza virus strain A/PR/8/34 to rationally design live attenuated influenza virus vaccine candidates through genome-scale changes in codon-pair bias. As attenuation is based on many hundreds of nucleotide changes across the viral genome, reversion of the attenuated variant to a virulent form is unlikely.

Improved algorithms for approximate string matching (extended abstract).

Background: The problem of approximate string matching is important in many different areas such as computational biology, text processing and pattern recognition. A great effort has been made to design efficient algorithms addressing several variants of the problem, including comparison of two strings, approximate pattern identification in a string or calculation of the longest common subsequence that two strings share.

Results: We designed an output sensitive algorithm solving the edit distance problem between two strings of lengths n and m respectively in time O((s - |n - m|).

Virus attenuation by genome-scale changes in codon pair bias.

As a result of the redundancy of the genetic code, adjacent pairs of amino acids can be encoded by as many as 36 different pairs of synonymous codons. A species-specific "codon pair bias" provides that some synonymous codon pairs are used more or less frequently than statistically predicted. We synthesized de novo large DNA molecules using hundreds of over-or underrepresented synonymous codon pairs to encode the poliovirus capsid protein.

Reduction of the rate of poliovirus protein synthesis through large-scale codon deoptimization causes attenuation of viral virulence by lowering specific infectivity.

Exploring the utility of de novo gene synthesis with the aim of designing stably attenuated polioviruses (PV), we followed two strategies to construct PV variants containing synthetic replacements of the capsid coding sequences either by deoptimizing synonymous codon usage (PV-AB) or by maximizing synonymous codon position changes of the existing wild-type (wt) poliovirus codons (PV-SD). Despite 934 nucleotide changes in the capsid coding region, PV-SD RNA produced virus with wild-type characteristics. In contrast, no viable virus was recovered from PV-AB RNA carrying 680 silent mutations, due to a reduction of genome translation and replication below a critical level.

Outer membrane protein genes and their small non-coding RNA regulator genes in Photorhabdus luminescens.

Introduction: Three major outer membrane protein genes of Escherichia coli, ompF, ompC, and ompA respond to stress factors. Transcripts from these genes are regulated by the small non-coding RNAs micF, micC, and micA, respectively. Here we examine Photorhabdus luminescens, an organism that has a different habitat from E.