Publications by authors named "Leow T"

Article Synopsis
  • The systematic review included 13 studies with 1,131 participants, showing that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) significantly reduced depressive and PTSD symptoms, with medium effect sizes.
  • MBSR also improved mindfulness in veterans, with some treatment effects maintained at follow-up for depression and mindfulness, though not for PTSD symptoms.
  • There were no notable differences in outcomes between MBSR and other therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy or person-centered group therapy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hot springs are known to harbor potentially unique microorganisms due to the extreme temperatures in which they thrive and their biotechnologically important enzymes that are active at high temperature, which are beneficial for various industries. Sabah, Malaysia, houses several hot springs, yet knowledge of their microbiological diversity remains limited. Here, the raw sequence data of bacterial communities in a hot spring through metagenomic analysis are revealed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) help organisms survive in cold conditions by preventing ice crystal formation; however, some show low effectiveness for practical applications like cryopreservation.
  • The research focuses on enhancing the cryopreservation potential of an AFPIV by using a helical peptide from Antarctic yeast and designing a new linker, employing various bioinformatics tools to model and analyze these changes.
  • Molecular dynamics simulations revealed that the modified antifreeze protein, AFP1mb, exhibited improved structural stability and more effective ice interaction, making it a promising candidate for cryoprotective applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A histidine acid phosphatase (HAP) (PhySc) with 99.50% protein sequence similarity with PHO5 from Saccharomyces cerevisiae was expressed functionally with the molecular mass of ∼110 kDa through co-expression along with the set of molecular chaperones dnaK, dnaJ, GroESL. The purified HAP illustrated the optimum activity of 28.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the past few decades, cancer immunotherapy has experienced a significant revolution due to the advancements in immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) and adoptive cell therapies (ACTs), along with their regulatory approvals. In recent times, there has been hope in the effectiveness of cancer vaccines for therapy as they have been able to stimulate de novo T-cell reactions against tumor antigens. These tumor antigens include both tumor-associated antigen (TAA) and tumor-specific antigen (TSA).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: University non-continuation, also termed as university dropout in literature, is a concern for institutions. Elevated stress levels, mental distress, and psychiatric issues affect academic performance and thus may contribute to non-continuation. There is a lack of systematic reviews exploring the link between mental health and university non-continuation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Enzymes play a crucial role in various industrial sectors. These biocatalysts not only ensure sustainability and safety but also enhance process efficiency through their unique specificity. Lipases possess versatility as biocatalysts and find utilization in diverse bioconversion reactions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Producing recombinant proteins is a major accomplishment of biotechnology in the past century. Heterologous hosts, either eukaryotic or prokaryotic, are used for the production of these proteins. The utilization of microbial host systems continues to dominate as the most efficient and affordable method for biotherapeutics and food industry productions.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Enzymes are often required to function in a particular reaction condition by the industrial procedure. In order to identify critical residues affecting the optimum pH of Staphylococcal lipases, chimeric lipases from homologous lipases were generated via a DNA shuffling strategy. Chimeric 1 included mutations of G166S, K212E, T243A, H271Y.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The flexibility and the low production costs offered by plastics have made them crucial to society. Unfortunately, due to their resistance to biological degradation, plastics remain in the environment for an extended period of time, posing a growing risk to life on earth. Synthetic treatments of plastic waste damage the environment and may cause damage to human health.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Yeasts serve as exceptional hosts in the manufacturing of functional protein engineering and possess industrial or medical utilities. Considerable focus has been directed towards yeast owing to its inherent benefits and recent advancements in this particular cellular host. The Pichia pastoris expression system is widely recognized as a prominent and widely accepted instrument in molecular biology for the purpose of generating recombinant proteins.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

COVID-19 results from SARS-CoV-2, which mutates frequently, challenging current treatments. Therefore, it is critical to develop new therapeutic drugs against this disease. This study explores the interaction between SARS-CoV-2 3CL and RetroMAD1, a well-characterized coronavirus protein and potential drug target, using in-silico methods.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Venous thromboembolism is a well-established preventable complication after colectomy. Specific guidance on venous thromboembolism prevention after colectomy for benign disease is limited.

Objective: This meta-analysis aimed to quantify the venous thromboembolism risk after benign colorectal resection and determine its variability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

GDSL esterase is designated as a member of Family II of lipolytic enzymes known to catalyse the synthesis and hydrolysis of ester bonds. The enzyme possesses a highly conserved motif Ser-Gly-Asn-His in the four conserved blocks I, II, III and V respectively. The enzyme characteristics, such as region-, chemo-, and enantioselectivity, help in resolving the racemic mixture of single-isomer chiral drugs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Heterologous functional expression of the recombinant lipases is typically a bottleneck due to the expression in the insoluble fraction as inclusion bodies (IBs) which are in inactive form. Due to the importance of lipases in various industrial applications, many investigations have been conducted to discover suitable approaches to obtain functional lipase or increase the expressed yield in the soluble fraction. The utilization of the appropriate prokaryotic and eukaryotic expression systems, along with the suitable vectors, promoters, and tags, has been recognized as a practical approach.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the last few decades, cancer has been regarded as an independent and self sustaining progression. The earliest hallmarks of cancer comprise of sustaining proliferative signalling, avoiding growth suppressors, resisting cell death, enabling replicative immortality, inducing angiogenesis, and activating invasion and metastasis. Nonetheless, two emerging hallmarks are being described: aberrant metabolic pathways and evasion of immune destruction.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Lipase biocatalysts offer unique properties which are often impaired by low thermal and methanol stability. In this study, the rational design was employed to engineer a disulfide bond in the protein structure of Geobacillus zalihae T1 lipase in order to improve its stability. The selection of targeted disulfide bond sites was based on analysis of protein spatial configuration and change of Gibbs free energy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Engineered thermostable microbial enzymes are widely employed to catalyze chemical reactions in numerous industrial sectors. Although high thermostability is a prerequisite of industrial applications, enzyme activity is usually sacrificed during thermostability improvement. Therefore, it is vital to select the common and compatible strategies between thermostability and activity improvement to reduce mutants̕ libraries and screening time.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Tumour heterogeneity refers to the complexity of cell subpopulations coexisting within the tumour microenvironment (TME), such as proliferating tumour cells, tumour stromal cells and infiltrating immune cells. The bidirectional interactions between cancer and the surrounding microenvironment mark the tumour survival and promotion functions, which allow the cancer cells to become invasive and initiate the metastatic cascade. Importantly, these interactions have been closely associated with metabolic reprogramming, which can modulate the differentiation and functions of immune cells and thus initiate the antitumour response.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Determining structure of highly flexible protein with multiple conformations can be challenging. This paper aims to combine molecular dynamics (MD) and small angle X-ray diffraction (SAX) techniques as a solution to overcome issues related to protein conformation in hardly crystallized protein. Based on prior studies, a cold-active lipase AMS8 was simulated in solvents showing stability in its N-terminal and high flexibility in its C-terminal.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Thermostability is an essential requirement of enzymes in the industrial processes to catalyze the reactions at high temperatures; thus, enzyme engineering through directed evolution, semi-rational design and rational design are commonly employed to construct desired thermostable mutants. Several strategies are implemented to fulfill enzymes' thermostability demand including decreasing the entropy of the unfolded state through substitutions Gly → Xxx or Xxx → Pro, hydrogen bond, salt bridge, introducing two different simultaneous interactions through single mutant, hydrophobic interaction, filling the hydrophobic cavity core, decreasing surface hydrophobicity, truncating loop, aromatic-aromatic interaction and introducing positively charged residues to enzyme surface. In the current review, horizons about compatibility between secondary structures and substitutions at preferable structural positions to generate the most desirable thermostability in industrial enzymes are broadened.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Otomastoiditis caused by the bacteria Fusobacterium necrophorum can lead to severe complications like meningitis and requires early diagnosis, which is challenging due to a lack of known early signs and insufficient research on treatment options.
  • A study conducted over ten years at two university medical centers in the Netherlands analyzed cases of otomastoiditis caused by F. necrophorum, finding that 80% of patients experienced complications requiring readmission within six months, and most were treated with antibiotics and additional therapies such as surgery.
  • The findings suggest that both patients and parents should be made aware of the potential seriousness of this condition, and early diagnosis should be prioritized, particularly in young children showing specific symptoms such as high CRP levels
View Article and Find Full Text PDF