Publications by authors named "Mohammad S Khalifa"

Wastewater-based epidemiology has been used extensively throughout the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 19) pandemic to detect and monitor the spread and prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) and its variants. It has proven an excellent, complementary tool to clinical sequencing, supporting the insights gained and helping to make informed public-health decisions. Consequently, many groups globally have developed bioinformatics pipelines to analyse sequencing data from wastewater.

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Within months of the COVID-19 pandemic being declared on March 20, 2020, novel, more infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2 began to be detected in geospatially distinct regions of the world. With international travel being a lead cause of spread of the disease, the importance of rapidly identifying variants entering a country is critical. In this study, we utilized wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) to monitor the presence of variants in wastewater generated in managed COVID-19 quarantine facilities for international air passengers entering the United Kingdom.

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Article Synopsis
  • Lentiviral vectors (LV) are promising tools for gene therapy, but can lead to insertional mutagenesis, making it crucial to study their integration into host genomes.
  • The research focuses on how transcription factors (TF) may influence the process of LV integration by mapping predicted binding sites near the insertion points chosen by HIV-1 LV in human induced pluripotent stem cells and their derivatives.
  • Findings indicate that specific transcription factor binding sites (pTFBS) are enriched in the LV insertion sites and are essential for the HIV-1 life cycle, suggesting their importance in viral survival and propagation.
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Malignant melanomas within the eye present different types of metabolic and metastatic behavior. Uveal melanoma (UM) affects a quarter of a million individuals in the USA; however, the molecular pathogenesis is not well understood. Although UV radiation is a risk factor in cutaneous melanomas, it is not crucial for UM progression.

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The bacterium contains a single circular chromosome with a defined architecture. DNA replication initiates at a single origin called Two replication forks are assembled and proceed in opposite directions until they fuse in a specialised zone opposite the origin. This termination area is flanked by polar replication fork pause sites that allow forks to enter, but not to leave.

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