Salmon aquaculture is the fastest growing animal protein production system in the world; however, intensive farming leads to poor weight gain, stress, and disease outbreaks. Probiotics offer the potential to enhance growth performance and feed efficiency in Atlantic salmon, as well as immunostimulate fish against common pathogens, benefitting farmers and consumers with more efficient production. Here, we isolated and identified 900 native microbial isolates including 18 Lactobacilli from the farmed salmon intestines.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe last two decades have witnessed a tremendous growth in probiotics and in the numbers of publications on their potential health benefits. Owing to their distinguishing beneficial effects and long history of safe use, species belonging to the Lactobacillus genus are among the most widely used probiotic species in human food and dietary supplements and are finding increased use in animal feed. Here, we isolated, identified, and evaluated the safety of two novel Limosilactobacillus reuteri (L.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioinformatics
December 2020
Motivation: Facilitated by technological advances and expeditious decrease in the sequencing costs, whole-genome sequencing is increasingly implemented to uncover variations in cultivars/accessions of many crop plants. In tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), the availability of the genome sequence, followed by the resequencing of tomato cultivars and its wild relatives, has provided a prodigious resource for the improvement of traits. A high-quality genome resequencing of 84 tomato accessions and wild relatives generated a dataset that can be used as a resource to identify agronomically important alleles across the genome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Use next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology to improve our diagnostic yield in patients with suspected genetic disorders in the Asian setting.
Design: A diagnostic study conducted between 2014 and 2019 (and ongoing) under the Singapore Undiagnosed Disease Program. Date of last analysis was 1 July 2019.
Summary: ChronQC is a quality control (QC) tracking system for clinical implementation of next-generation sequencing (NGS). ChronQC generates time series plots for various QC metrics to allow comparison of current runs to historical runs. ChronQC has multiple features for tracking QC data including Westgard rules for clinical validity, laboratory-defined thresholds and historical observations within a specified time period.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlobal climate change and acquired resistance to insecticides are threats to world food security. Drosophila suzukii, a devastating invasive pest in many parts of the world, causes substantial economic losses to fruit production industries, forcing farmers to apply broad-spectrum insecticides frequently. This could lead to the development of insecticide resistance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring ongoing proteomic analysis of the soybean ( (L.) Merr) germplasm collection, PI 603408 was identified as a landrace whose seeds lack accumulation of one of the major seed storage glycinin protein subunits. Whole genomic resequencing was used to identify a two-base deletion affecting The newly discovered deletion was confirmed to be causative through immunological, genetic, and proteomic analysis, and no significant differences in total seed protein content were found to be due to the loss-of-function mutation In addition to focused studies on this one specific subunit-encoding gene, a total of 1,858,185 nucleotide variants were identified, of which 39,344 were predicted to affect protein coding regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A series of 2,4-diamino-s-triazines was designed, with potential for activity against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) dihydrofolate reductase enzyme, on the basis of virtual screening results and structure-based drug design.
Results: The compounds were evaluated against Mtb (H37Rv) and their cytotoxicity was assessed using VERO cell lines. Of particular note, two compounds were found to have the most promising antituberculosis activity (6b minimum inhibitory concentration: 1.
In an attempt to highlight structural features required for potent antitubercular activity, five pharmacophoric features were developed for PA-824 and its analogs. The generated pharmacophore indicated importance of a nitro group, three hydrogen bond acceptor features, and a distal aromatic ring for potent activity. The model based on pharmacophore alignment has good correlation coefficient for the training set (r(2) = 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) has been used as a target for antimicrobial drug discovery against a variety of pathogenic microorganisms, including opportunistic microorganisms; Pneumocystis carinii (pc), Toxoplasma gondii (tg) and Mycobacterium avium complex (ma). In this regard, several DHFR inhibitors are reported against pc and tg and ma. However, selectivity issue of these inhibitors over human DHFR often preclude their development and clinical use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on stereoelectronic feature analysis using density functional theory (DFT) at B3LYP/3-21∗G level, a series of 4-(5-nitrofuran-2-yl)prop-2-en-1-one derivatives with low LUMO energies (<-0.10eV); concentrated over the nitro group, furan moiety and α,β-unsaturated carbonyl bridge were envisaged as potential antitubercular agents. The target compounds were prepared by condensation of 5-nitro-2-furaldehyde with various ketones under acidic condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSiderophores are small molecules produced by bacteria under iron-scarcity conditions faced by bacteria inside host. Sideophores bind iron with high affinity (Kd < 10-25 M) and are required for iron transport into the bacterial cell. Small molecules interfering with siderophore functioning can be promising anti-mycobacterial agents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present work deals with design, synthesis and biological evaluation of novel, diverse compounds as potential inhibitors of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) from opportunistic microorganisms; Pneumocystis carinii (pc), Toxoplasma gondii (tg) and Mycobacterium avium (ma). A set of 14 structurally diverse compounds were designed with varying key pharmacophoric features of DHFR inhibitors, bulky distal substitutions and different bridges joining the distal part and 2,4-diaminopyrimidine nucleus. The designed compounds were synthesized and evaluated in enzyme assay against pc, tg and ma DHFR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInhibitors of aryl acid adenylating enzymes (AAAE), known as MbtA, involved in siderophore biosynthesis in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, are being explored as potential antitubercular agents. In this article, we report the development of a robust pharmacophore model and investigation of structure-activity relationship of several nucleoside bisubstrate analogs reported as MbtA inhibitors. The developed pharmacophore model revealed the importance of two hydrogen bond donors and one hydrogen bond acceptor features.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn an attempt to identify potential new agents active against tuberculosis, 20 novel phenylacrylamide derivatives incorporating cinnamic acids and guanylhydrazones were synthesized using microwave assisted synthesis. Activity of the synthesized compounds was evaluated using resazurin microtitre plate assay (REMA) against Mycobacterium tuberculosis H37Rv. Based on empirical structure-activity relationship data it was observed that both steric and electronic parameters play major role in the activity of this series of compounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwenty-one biguanide and dihydrotriazine derivatives were synthesized and evaluated as inhibitors of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) from opportunistic microorganisms: Pneumocystis carinii (pc), Toxoplasma gondii (tg), Mycobacterium avium (ma), and rat liver (rl). The most potent compound in the series was B2-07 with 12 nM activity against tgDHFR. The most striking observation was that B2-07 showed similar potency to trimetrexate, approximately 233-fold improved potency over trimethoprim and approximately 7-fold increased selectivity as compared to trimetrexate against tgDHFR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDihydrofolate reductase (DHFR) is a well-known target for antibacterial and anticancer therapy. DHFR inhibitors are useful for protozoan parasites, but are yet to be explored against metazoan species; hence the present work was designed to evaluate the efficacy of DHFR inhibitors against filariasis, one of the major neglected tropical diseases. Molecules from our in-house library of synthetic antifolate agents (biguanide and dihydrotriazine derivatives) were evaluated along with the antimalarial drug pyrimethamine and the antibacterial drug trimethoprim in an in vitro model against Brugia malayi microfilariae (Mf).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA five point pharmacophore was generated using PHASE for a series of nitroaromatic compounds and their congeners as antitubercular agents. The generated pharmacophore yielded significant 3D-QSAR model with r(2) of 0.890 for a training set of 92 molecules.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPharmacophore mapping studies were undertaken for a series of molecules belonging to pyrrolopyrimidines, indolopyrimidines and their congeners as multidrug resistance-associated protein (MRP1) modulators. A five-point pharmacophore with two hydrogen bond acceptors (A), one lipophilic/hydrophobic group (H), one positive ionic feature (P) and one aromatic ring (R) as pharmacophoric features was developed. The pharmacophore hypothesis yielded a statistically significant 3D-QSAR model, with a correlation coefficient of r2 = 0.
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