MIBiG 4.0: advancing biosynthetic gene cluster curation through global collaboration.

Specialized or secondary metabolites are small molecules of biological origin, often showing potent biological activities with applications in agriculture, engineering and medicine. Usually, the biosynthesis of these natural products is governed by sets of co-regulated and physically clustered genes known as biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). To share information about BGCs in a standardized and machine-readable way, the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG) data standard and repository was initiated in 2015.

The Natural Products Atlas 3.0: extending the database of microbially derived natural products.

The Natural Products Atlas is a database of microbially derived natural products that contains structures, producing organism taxonomy, biosynthetic and chemical ontology classifications, grouping by compound classes and cross-links to a suite of other natural product-related data resources. The database is supported by a web server that includes functionality to browse the collection, search the database using both chemical structures and text/numerical terms and visualize the chemical diversity it contains using interactive dashboards. In the current database release, we have curated 1347 papers, increasing the number of compounds to 36 545.

Microbe Profile: : antibiotics for every niche.

species comprise a genus of filamentous, sporulating bacteria belonging to the phylum Actinomycetota, formerly Actinobacteria. They are found in marine and freshwater sediments and soils and associated with marine animals, insects, and plants. To date, they have mostly been studied because of their mutually beneficial symbiosis with fungus-growing ants in the tribe .

Multi-omics analysis of antagonistic interactions among free-living Pseudonocardia from diverse ecosystems.

Actinomycetes are a phylogenetically diverse bacterial group which are widely distributed across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Within this order, the genus Pseudonocardia and their specialised metabolites have been the focus of previous ecological studies due to their antagonistic interactions with other microorganisms and their mutualistic interactions with insects. However, the chemical ecology of free-living Pseudonocardia remains understudied.

Proactive interference of visual working memory chunks implicates long-term memory.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a limited cognitive resource that can be functionally expanded through chunking (Miller, 1956). For example, participants can hold an increasing number of colours in mind as they learn to chunk reliably paired combinations (Brady et al., 2009).

Fluctuations in Sustained Attention Explain Moment-to-Moment Shifts in Children's Memory Formation.

Why do children's memories often differ from adults' after the same experience? Whereas prior work has focused on children's immature memory mechanisms to answer this question, here we focus on the costs of attentional lapses for learning. We track sustained attention and memory formation across time in 7- to 10-year-old children and adults ( = 120) to show that sustained attention causally shapes the fate of children's individual memories. Moreover, children's attention lapsed twice as frequently as adults', and attention fluctuated with memory formation more closely in children than adults.

Polygenic risk for depression and anterior and posterior hippocampal volume in children and adolescents.

Background: Depression has frequently been associated with smaller hippocampal volume. The hippocampus varies in function along its anterior-posterior axis, with the anterior hippocampus more strongly associated with stress and emotion processing. The goals of this study were to examine the associations among parental history of anxiety/depression, polygenic risk scores for depression (PGS-DEP), and anterior and posterior hippocampal volumes in children and adolescents.

Antibiotics from rare actinomycetes, beyond the genus Streptomyces.

Throughout the golden age of antibiotic discovery, Streptomyces have been unsurpassed for their ability to produce bioactive metabolites. Yet, this success has been hampered by rediscovery. As we enter a new stage of biodiscovery, omics data and existing scientific repositories can enable informed choices on the biodiversity that may yield novel antibiotics.

Artificial intelligence for natural product drug discovery.

Developments in computational omics technologies have provided new means to access the hidden diversity of natural products, unearthing new potential for drug discovery. In parallel, artificial intelligence approaches such as machine learning have led to exciting developments in the computational drug design field, facilitating biological activity prediction and de novo drug design for molecular targets of interest. Here, we describe current and future synergies between these developments to effectively identify drug candidates from the plethora of molecules produced by nature.

Comparing visual memories to similar visual inputs risks lasting memory distortion.

Maintaining perceptual experiences in visual working memory (VWM) allows us to flexibly accomplish various tasks, but some tasks come at a price. For example, comparing VWM representations to novel perceptual inputs can induce inadvertent memory distortions. If these distortions can persist, they may explain why everyday memories often become unreliable after people perform perceptual comparisons (e.

What sticks after statistical learning: The persistence of implicit versus explicit memory traces.

Statistical learning is a powerful mechanism that extracts even subtle regularities from our information-dense worlds. Recent theories argue that statistical learning can occur through multiple mechanisms-both the conventionally assumed automatic process that precipitates unconscious learning, and an attention-dependent process that brings regularities into conscious awareness. While this view has gained popularity, there are few empirical dissociations of the hypothesized implicit and explicit forms of statistical learning.

Pay attention and you might miss it: Greater learning during attentional lapses.

Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well-documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful-a benefit that prior research focusing only on goal-relevant memory would miss.

MIBiG 3.0: a community-driven effort to annotate experimentally validated biosynthetic gene clusters.

With an ever-increasing amount of (meta)genomic data being deposited in sequence databases, (meta)genome mining for natural product biosynthetic pathways occupies a critical role in the discovery of novel pharmaceutical drugs, crop protection agents and biomaterials. The genes that encode these pathways are often organised into biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). In 2015, we defined the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG): a standardised data format that describes the minimally required information to uniquely characterise a BGC.

Aging shifts the relative contributions of episodic and semantic memory to decision-making.

Healthy aging is accompanied by well-characterized shifts in memory systems: episodic memory tends to decline with age while semantic memory remains relatively intact, with some knowledge domains strengthening. Beyond reflecting on the past, these distinct memory systems often guide decisions about the future. Yet how such age-related memory shifts influence simple value-based choices remain understudied.

A corollary discharge mediates saccade-related inhibition of single units in mnemonic structures of the human brain.

Despite the critical link between visual exploration and memory, little is known about how neuronal activity in the human mesial temporal lobe (MTL) is modulated by saccades. Here, we characterize saccade-associated neuronal modulations, unit-by-unit, and contrast them to image onset and to occipital lobe neurons. We reveal evidence for a corollary discharge (CD)-like modulatory signal that accompanies saccades, inhibiting/exciting a unique population of broad-/narrow-spiking units, respectively, before and during saccades and with directional selectivity.

ActinoBase: tools and protocols for researchers working on and other filamentous actinobacteria.

Actinobacteria is an ancient phylum of Gram-positive bacteria with a characteristic high GC content to their DNA. The ActinoBase Wiki is focused on the filamentous actinobacteria, such as species, and the techniques and growth conditions used to study them. These organisms are studied because of their complex developmental life cycles and diverse specialised metabolism which produces many of the antibiotics currently used in the clinic.

Overcoming drug resistance, the natural way.

Colistin is an antibiotic of last resort for treating Gram-negative bacterial infections, but resistance is spreading rapidly. In a recent issue of Nature, Wang et al. use genome mining to identify and synthesize a natural variant that bypasses colistin resistance and offers new hope for tackling antimicrobial resistance.

The Natural Products Atlas 2.0: a database of microbially-derived natural products.

Within the natural products field there is an increasing emphasis on the study of compounds from microbial sources. This has been fuelled by interest in the central role that microorganisms play in mediating both interspecies interactions and host-microbe relationships. To support the study of natural products chemistry produced by microorganisms we released the Natural Products Atlas, a database of known microbial natural products structures, in 2019.

sp. nov. and sp. nov., two novel actinomycetes isolated from the deep Southern Ocean.

The actinomycetes strains KRD168 and KRD185 were isolated from sediments collected from the deep Southern Ocean and, in this work, they are described as representing two novel species of the genus through a polyphasic approach. Despite sharing >99 % 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity with other members of the genus, comparative genomic analysis allowed species delimitation based on average nucleotide identity and digital DNA-DNA hybridization. The KRD168 genome is characterized by a size of 6.

OpenMaze: An open-source toolbox for creating virtual navigation experiments.

Incorporating 3D virtual environments into psychological experiments offers an innovative solution for balancing experimental control and ecological validity. Their flexible application to virtual navigation experiments, however, has been limited because accessible development tools best support only a subset of desirable task design features. We created OpenMaze, an open-source toolbox for the Unity game engine, to overcome this barrier.

Events structure information accessibility less in children than adults.

To manage the onslaught of continuously unfolding information in our complex environments, we adults are known to carve up our continuous experience into meaningful events, a process referred to as event segmentation. This segmentation directly shapes how our everyday experiences are construed: content experienced within an event is held mentally in an accessible state, which is then dropped after an event boundary. The greater accessibility of event-specific information has been shown to influence-at its most basic level-how information is processed and remembered.

Changes in Hospital Discharges with Alcohol-Related Liver Disease in a Gastroenterology and General Medical Unit Following the Introduction of Minimum Unit Pricing of Alcohol: The GRI Q4 Study.

Aims: Minimum unit price (MUP) of 50 pence per unit of alcohol was introduced in Scotland on the 1 May 2018. We assessed alcohol-related liver disease (ArLD) discharges from Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI) before and after the introduction of MUP.

Methods: Medical records of all patients discharged from Gastroenterology wards at GRI in the fourth quarter (Q4) of the years 2015-2019 were reviewed.