Climate Change-Induced Decline in Succulent in Namibia's Arid Regions.

The global rise in temperatures due to climate change has made it difficult even for specialised desert-adapted plant species to survive on sandy desert soils. Two of Namibia's iconic desert-adapted plant species, and the quiver tree , have recently been shown to be under threat because of climate change. In the current study, three ecologically important Namibian milk bushes were evaluated for their climate change response.

Effectiveness of Using AI-Driven Hotspot Mapping for Active Case Finding of Tuberculosis in Southwestern Nigeria.

: Nigeria is among the top five countries that have the highest gap between people reported as diagnosed and estimated to have developed tuberculosis (TB). To bridge this gap, there is a need for innovative approaches to identify geographical areas at high risk of TB transmission and targeted active case finding (ACF) interventions. Leveraging community-level data together with granular sociodemographic contextual information can unmask local hotspots that could be otherwise missed.

MetaNovo: An open-source pipeline for probabilistic peptide discovery in complex metaproteomic datasets.

Background: Microbiome research is providing important new insights into the metabolic interactions of complex microbial ecosystems involved in fields as diverse as the pathogenesis of human diseases, agriculture and climate change. Poor correlations typically observed between RNA and protein expression datasets make it hard to accurately infer microbial protein synthesis from metagenomic data. Additionally, mass spectrometry-based metaproteomic analyses typically rely on focused search sequence databases based on prior knowledge for protein identification that may not represent all the proteins present in a set of samples.

A pilot study to show that asymptomatic sexually transmitted infections alter the foreskin epithelial proteome.

There is limited data on the role of asymptomatic STIs (aSTIs) on the risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) acquisition in the male genital tract (MGT). The impact of foreskin removal on lowering HIV acquisition is well described, but molecular events leading to HIV acquisition are unclear. Here, in this pilot study, we show that asymptomatic urethral infection with (CT) significantly impacts the foreskin proteome composition.

Lactic acid from vaginal microbiota enhances cervicovaginal epithelial barrier integrity by promoting tight junction protein expression.

Background: Women with a cervicovaginal microbiota dominated by Lactobacillus spp. are at reduced risk of acquiring sexually transmitted infections including HIV, but the biological mechanisms involved remain poorly defined. Here, we performed metaproteomics on vaginal swab samples from young South African women (n = 113) and transcriptomics analysis of cervicovaginal epithelial cell cultures to examine the ability of lactic acid, a metabolite produced by cervicovaginal lactobacilli, to modulate genital epithelial barrier function.