Objectives: The National Library of Medicine (NLM) currently indexes close to a million articles each year pertaining to more than 5300 medicine and life sciences journals. Of these, a significant number of articles contain critical information about the structure, genetics, and function of genes and proteins in normal and disease states. These articles are identified by the NLM curators, and a manual link is created between these articles and the corresponding gene records at the NCBI Gene database.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic posed a threat to global society. Delta and Omicron are concerning variants due to the risk of increasing human-to-human transmissibility and immune evasion. This study aims to evaluate the binding ability of these variants toward the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor and antibodies using a computational approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Loss-of-function (LOF) alterations in tumour suppressor genes cannot be directly targeted. Approaches characterising gene function and vulnerabilities conferred by such mutations are required.
Methods: Here, we computationally map genetic networks of KMT2D, a tumour suppressor gene frequently mutated in several cancer types.
Introduction: Point Zero located within the vagus nerve's auricular branch shows promise in addressing imbalances. This study aims to explore its effects on vagal activity using auricular acupressure (AA), measured through heart rate variability (HRV).
Methods: This single-blinded randomized controlled trial involved 114 healthy volunteers randomly assigned to receive AA (AA group, = 57) or sham-AA (SA group, = 57) at Point Zero.
Mitochondria are responsible for maintaining cellular energy levels, and play a major role in regulating homeostasis, which ensures physiological function from the molecular to whole animal. Sirtuin 3 (SIRT3) is the major protein deacetylase of mitochondria. SIRT3 serves as a nutrient sensor; under conditions of mild metabolic stress, SIRT3 activity is increased.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTropical river deltas, and the social-ecological systems they sustain, are changing rapidly due to anthropogenic activity and climatic change. Baseline data to inform sustainable management options for resilient deltas is urgently needed and palaeolimnology (reconstructing past conditions from lake or wetland deposits) can provide crucial long-term perspectives needed to identify drivers and rates of change. We review how palaeolimnology can be a valuable tool for resource managers using three current issues facing tropical delta regions: hydrology and sediment supply, salinisation and nutrient pollution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs in origami, morphogenesis in living systems heavily relies on tissue curving and folding through the interplay between biochemical and biomechanical cues. By contrast, certain organs maintain their flat posture over several days. Here, we identified a pathway that is required for the maintenance of organ flatness, taking the sepal, the outermost floral organ, in Arabidopsis as a model system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe automatic recognition of biomedical relationships is an important step in the semantic understanding of the information contained in the unstructured text of the published literature. The BioRED track at BioCreative VIII aimed to foster the development of such methods by providing the participants the BioRED-BC8 corpus, a collection of 1000 PubMed documents manually curated for diseases, gene/proteins, chemicals, cell lines, gene variants, and species, as well as pairwise relationships between them which are disease-gene, chemical-gene, disease-variant, gene-gene, chemical-disease, chemical-chemical, chemical-variant, and variant-variant. Furthermore, relationships are categorized into the following semantic categories: positive correlation, negative correlation, binding, conversion, drug interaction, comparison, cotreatment, and association.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Electroacupuncture (EA) is commonly employed for carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), whereas laser acupuncture (LA) seems to offer a safer and more convenient alternative. Nevertheless, transitioning from EA to LA requires evidence. This study aims to compare their clinical efficacy and safety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEngineered nanoparticles (NPs) pose a broad spectrum of interesting properties that make them useful for many applications. However, continuous exposure to NPs requires the need to deeply understand the outcomes when these NPs interact with different biological environments. After exposure within (to) these environments, the pristine surfaces of NPs strongly interact with the molecules from the surrounding medium, including metabolites, lipids, glycan, and proteins, forming the so-called protein corona (PC).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn most plant species, sepals-the outermost floral organs-provide a protective shield for reproductive organs. How the floral bud becomes sealed is unknown. In Arabidopsis, we identified a small region at the sepal tip that is markedly curved inward early on and remains curved even after anthesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground In the face of the escalating COVID-19 pandemic amid shortages of medications and vaccines, a Vietnamese herbal formula known as Shen Cao Gan Jiang Tang (SCGJT) has been put into use for non-severe COVID-19 patients. This study aims to assess its efficacy and safety. Methods A multicenter, open-label, randomized controlled trial was conducted on 300 patients with non-severe COVID-19, randomly assigned into two groups: 150 receiving standard care (control group) and 150 receiving additional SCGJT for 10 days (SCGJT group).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Auricular acupuncture (AA) has been widely used in overweight and obesity management due to its safety and effectiveness. The combination of other acupuncture therapies with thread-embedding acupuncture (TEA) has shown enhanced effects. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding AA plus TEA for overweight and obesity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFour new mexicanolide-type limonoids, swietemicrolides A-D (1-4), together with three known compounds (5-7) were isolated from an ethyl acetate extract of the bark of . 1 and 2 had 1,8-hemiacetal systems whilst 3 and 4 shared hexacyclic skeletons consisting of three fused five-membered rings. The structures of the isolated compounds were determined using spectroscopic methods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow organisms produce organs with robust shapes and sizes is still an open question. In recent years, the sepal has been used as a model system to study this question because of its highly reproducible shape and size. One interesting aspect of the sepal is that its epidermis contains cells of very different sizes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Primary dysmenorrhea is a common condition that impacts quality of life significantly. Auricular therapies have shown promise for treating primary dysmenorrhea, but there is a lack of evidence specifically for auricular acupuncture (AA). This study evaluated the safety and efficacy of AA for managing primary dysmenorrhea.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study applies Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory to investigate fishers' pro-environmental behavioral intention and their support for policies to reduce marine litter. While pro-environmental behavioral intention is often associated with personal environmental intention at the household level, policy support represents their support for government action at the political level. Therefore, we examine whether fishers are willing to engage in both of these dimensions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction The use of acupuncture has been suggested for the treatment of neck pain. Recently, a large body of evidence demonstrated that acupuncture has an effect on microcirculation in pain regions, but the exact mechanism remains unclear. This study aims to evaluate the skin surface thermographic changes in the posterior neck associated with manual acupuncture at the Houxi (SI-3) acupoint.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe adsorption of proteins onto the surface of nanoparticle (NP) leads to the formation of the so-called "protein corona" as consisting both loosely and tightly bound proteins. It is well established that the biological identity of NPs that may be acquired after exposure to a biological matrix is mostly provided by the components of the hard corona as the pristine surface is generally less accessible for binding. For that reason, the isolation and the characterisation of the NP-corona complexes and identification of the associated biomolecules can help in understanding its biological behaviour.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
January 2024
Cytochrome oxidase deficiency (COXD) is an inherited disorder characterized by the absence or mutation in the genes encoding for the cytochrome oxidase protein (COX). COX deficiency results in severe muscle weakness, heart, liver, and kidney disorders, as well as brain damage in infants and adolescents, leading to death in many cases. With no cure for this disorder, finding an efficient, inexpensive, and early means of diagnosis is essential to minimize symptoms and long-term disabilities.
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