Oral health care knowledge among Phenylketonuria patients in the Latvian population.

Background: Phenylketonuria (PKU) is an autosomal recessive inherited disorder of phenylalanine (Phe) metabolism that results from a deficiency of phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH). Patients with PKU rely on amino acid mixtures and low-protein diets, which often exhibit an acidic nature and pose various challenges to oral health. The objective of the study was to evaluate oral care habits of PKU patients in Latvia and the impact of the recommendations developed on improving oral care.

Building a FAIR data ecosystem for incorporating single-cell transcriptomics data into agricultural genome to phenome research.

Introduction: The agriculture genomics community has numerous data submission standards available, but the standards for describing and storing single-cell (SC, e.g., scRNA- seq) data are comparatively underdeveloped.

Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages.

The Indo-European languages are among the most widely spoken in the world, yet their early diversification remains contentious. It is widely accepted that the spread of this language family across Europe from the 5th millennium BP correlates with the expansion and diversification of steppe-related genetic ancestry from the onset of the Bronze Age. However, multiple steppe-derived populations co-existed in Europe during this period, and it remains unclear how these populations diverged and which provided the demographic channels for the ancestral forms of the Italic, Celtic, Greek, and Armenian languages.

Bullous pemphigoid and mucous membrane pemphigoid humoral responses differ in reactivity towards BP180 midportion and BP230.

Background: Bullous pemphigoid (BP) and mucous membrane pemphigoid (MMP) are rare autoimmune blistering disorders characterized by autoantibodies (autoAbs) targeting dermo-epidermal junction components such as BP180 and BP230. The differential diagnosis, based on both the time of appearance and the extension of cutaneous and/or mucosal lesions, is crucial to distinguish these diseases for improving therapy outcomes and delineating the correct prognosis; however, in some cases, it can be challenging. In addition, negative results obtained by commercially available enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) with BP and MMP sera, especially from patients with ocular involvement, often delay diagnosis and treatment, leading to a greater risk of poor outcomes.

The Bronchodilator and Anti-Inflammatory Effect of Long-Acting Muscarinic Antagonists in Asthma: An EAACI Position Paper.

As cholinergic innervation is a major contributor to increased vagal tone and mucus secretion, inhaled long-acting muscarinic antagonists (LAMA) are a pillar for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. By blocking the muscarinic receptors expressed in the lung, LAMA improve lung function and reduce exacerbations in asthma patients who remained poorly controlled despite treatment with inhaled corticosteroids and long-acting β2 agonists. Asthma guidelines recommend LAMA as a third controller to be added on before the initiation of biologicals.

A modular toolbox for the optogenetic deactivation of transcription.

Light-controlled transcriptional activation is a commonly used optogenetic strategy that allows researchers to regulate gene expression with high spatiotemporal precision. The vast majority of existing tools are, however, limited to light-triggered induction of gene expression. Here, we inverted this mode of action and created optogenetic systems capable of efficiently terminating transcriptional activation in response to blue light.

Intrinsic-dimension analysis for guiding dimensionality reduction and data fusion in multi-omics data processing.

Multi-omics data have revolutionized biomedical research by providing a comprehensive understanding of biological systems and the molecular mechanisms of disease development. However, analyzing multi-omics data is challenging due to high dimensionality and limited sample sizes, necessitating proper data-reduction pipelines to ensure reliable analyses. Additionally, its multimodal nature requires effective data-integration pipelines.

Ensembl 2025.

Ensembl (www.ensembl.org) is an open platform integrating publicly available genomics data across the tree of life with a focus on eukaryotic species related to human health, agriculture and biodiversity.

Redesign of the Chlamydomonas reinhardtii Q binding niche reveals photosynthesis works in the absence of a driving force for Q-Q electron transfer.

An in silico redesign of the secondary quinone electron acceptor (Q) binding pocket of the D1 protein of Photosystem II (PSII) suggested that mutations of the F265 residue would affect atrazine binding. Chlamydomonas reinhardtii mutants F265T and F265S were produced to obtain atrazine-hypersensitive strains for biosensor applications, and the mutants were indeed found to be more atrazine-sensitive than the reference strain IL. Fluorescence and thermoluminescence data agree with a weak driving force and confirm slow electron transfer but cannot exclude an additional effect on protonation of the secondary quinone.

Mental health symptoms and burdens after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Background: Previous studies have found adverse effects on mental health following infection with SARS-CoV-2. This study investigates whether mental health is also impaired in unknowingly infected individuals. In addition, the relevance of the severity of the infection and the time since the onset of infection were analyzed.

Efficient circular RNA synthesis for potent rolling circle translation.

Circular RNA (circRNA) is a candidate for next-generation messenger RNA therapeutics owing to its remarkable stability. Here we describe trans-splicing-based methods for the synthesis of circRNAs over 8,000 nucleotides. The methods are independent of bacterial sequences, outperform the permuted intron-exon method and allow for the incorporation of RNA modifications.

How to build the virtual cell with artificial intelligence: Priorities and opportunities.

Cells are essential to understanding health and disease, yet traditional models fall short of modeling and simulating their function and behavior. Advances in AI and omics offer groundbreaking opportunities to create an AI virtual cell (AIVC), a multi-scale, multi-modal large-neural-network-based model that can represent and simulate the behavior of molecules, cells, and tissues across diverse states. This Perspective provides a vision on their design and how collaborative efforts to build AIVCs will transform biological research by allowing high-fidelity simulations, accelerating discoveries, and guiding experimental studies, offering new opportunities for understanding cellular functions and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in open science.

Structural insights into context-dependent inhibitory mechanisms of chloramphenicol in cells.

Ribosome-targeting antibiotics represent an important class of antimicrobial drugs. Chloramphenicol (Cm) is a well-studied ribosomal peptidyl transferase center (PTC) binder and growing evidence suggests that its inhibitory action depends on the sequence of the nascent peptide. How such selective inhibition on the molecular scale manifests on the cellular level remains unclear.

Beyond Dimerization: Harnessing Tetrameric Coiled-Coils for Nanostructure Assembly.

Versatile DNA and polypeptide-based structures have been designed based on complementary modules. However, polypeptides can also form higher oligomeric states. We investigated the introduction of tetrameric modules as a substitute for coiled-coil dimerization units used in previous modular nanostructures.

Mobility Medicine: A call to unify hyper-fragmented specialties by abstracts sent to 2025Pdm3, and typescripts to Ejtm3, and .

Mega scientific conferences increasingly suffer from the need for short and poster presentations without discussion. An alternative is to organize workshops in hotels large enough to accommodate all participants. This significantly increases the opportunities for constructive discussion during breakfasts, lunches, dinners and long evenings that can bring together experts of scientific and clinical sub-specialties and young fellows.

New developments for the Quest for Orthologs benchmark service.

The Quest for Orthologs (QfO) orthology benchmark service (https://orthology.benchmarkservice.org) hosts a wide range of standardized benchmarks for orthology inference evaluation.

π-HuB: the proteomic navigator of the human body.

The human body contains trillions of cells, classified into specific cell types, with diverse morphologies and functions. In addition, cells of the same type can assume different states within an individual's body during their lifetime. Understanding the complexities of the proteome in the context of a human organism and its many potential states is a necessary requirement to understanding human biology, but these complexities can neither be predicted from the genome, nor have they been systematically measurable with available technologies.

DOME Registry: implementing community-wide recommendations for reporting supervised machine learning in biology.

Supervised machine learning (ML) is used extensively in biology and deserves closer scrutiny. The Data Optimization Model Evaluation (DOME) recommendations aim to enhance the validation and reproducibility of ML research by establishing standards for key aspects such as data handling and processing, optimization, evaluation, and model interpretability. The recommendations help to ensure that key details are reported transparently by providing a structured set of questions.

Mediterranean diet, neutrophil count, and carotid intima-media thickness in secondary prevention: the CORDIOPREV study.

Background And Aims: Several studies have supported the role of innate immune system as a key factor in the sterile inflammation underlying the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis in mice. However, its involvement in humans remains unclear. This study aimed to explore the association between neutrophil count, and the intima-media thickness of common carotid arteries (IMT-CC), as well as the potential impact of long-term dietary interventions on these associations.

The BRAHMA-associated SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complex controls Arabidopsis seed quality and physiology.

The SWI/SNF (SWItch/Sucrose Non-Fermentable) chromatin remodeling complex is involved in various aspects of plant development and stress responses. Here, we investigated the role of BRM (BRAHMA), a core catalytic subunit of the SWI/SNF complex, in Arabidopsis thaliana seed biology. brm-3 seeds exhibited enlarged size, reduced yield, increased longevity, and enhanced secondary dormancy, but did not show changes in primary dormancy or salt tolerance.

Artificial intelligence in tuberculosis: a new ally in disease control.

The challenges to effective tuberculosis (TB) disease control are considerable, and the current global targets for reductions in disease burden seem unattainable. The combination of complex pathophysiology and technical limitations results in difficulties in achieving consistent, reliable diagnoses, and long treatment regimens imply serious physiological and socioeconomic consequences for patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare have significantly improved patient care regarding diagnostics, treatment and basic research.

Keeping it in the family: using protein family templates to rescue low confidence AlphaFold2 models.

Motivation: High confidence structure prediction models have become available for nearly all protein sequences. More than 200 million AlphaFold2 models are now publicly available. We observe that there can be significant variability in the prediction confidence as judged by plDDT scores across a protein family.