Ruminant Brucellosis in the Kafr El Sheikh Governorate of the Nile Delta, Egypt: Prevalence of a Neglected Zoonosis

Brucellosis is a zoonosis of mammals caused by bacteria of the genus Brucella. It is responsible for a vast global burden imposed on human health through disability and on animal productivity. In humans brucellosis causes a range of flu-like symptoms and chronic debilitating illness. In livestock brucellosis causes economic losses as a result of abortion, infertility and decreased milk production. The main routes for human infection are consumption of contaminated dairy products and contact with infected ruminants. The control of brucellosis in humans depends on its control in ruminants, for which accurate estimates of the frequency of infection are very useful, especially in areas with no previous frequency estimates. We studied the seroprevalence of brucellosis and its geographic distribution among domestic ruminants in one governorate of the Nile Delta region, Egypt. In the study area, the seroprevalence of ruminant brucellosis is very high and has probably increased considerably since the early 1990s. The disease is widespread but more concentrated around major animal markets. These findings question the efficacy of the control strategy in place and highlight the high infection risk for the animal and human populations of the area and the urgent need for an improved control strategy

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Implementation of adaptive modulation for broadband wireless access networks using cognitive radio approaches

Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) has become the best way to meet escalating business demand for rapid Internet connection and integrated 'triple play' services. In addition, not only for topographic but also for technological limitations, alternative wireless solutions have been found. These systems are designed based on Cognitive Radio (CR) approaches, which can adjust its operation according to the environment and technical variations. This tracking feature allows the communication system to deliver the Best Ever, compare to Best Effort, services to the users. In this paper, an implementation of a cognitive engine for adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is presented. This engine will track the radio channel variations in terms of SNR and be able to select a suitable modulation order among predefined Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) to maintain the specified BER by the user requirements.</p

Laccase Production from Local Biomass Using Solid State Fermentation

The large family of enzymes, known as polyphenols oxidases, includes laccase. Due to the inclusion of a copper atom in their catalytic core, laccases are frequently referred to as multi-copper oxidases. Laccases are versatile enzymes that can catalyze the oxidation of a wide range of phenolic and non-phenolic substances. In the current study, a local strain of Aspergillus niger was used for solid-state fermentation to produce fungal laccase, as well as purify and optimize laccase. The enzyme profile, which was acquired using guaiacol to measure enzyme activity, showed that after five days of incubation, wheat straw provided the highest level of laccase activity, or 2.551 U/mL. A technique called response surface methodology (RSM) was used to examine the effects of various conditions on the production of enzymes. The RSM results demonstrated that after five days of incubation, the enzyme activity was at its highest at 45 °C, pH 5.5, and 30% moisture level, inoculated with 2 mL mycelium. Through ammonium sulphate precipitation and dialysis, the enzyme was purified. Additionally, column chromatography was used to further purify laccase. The next step was enzyme characterization to evaluate how temperature and pH affected enzyme activity. At 45 °C and pH 5.5, the isolated enzyme produced its highest level of activity. The findings of the current study showed that A. niger is capable of producing laccase in an economical and environmentally friendly way. Due to its unique oxidative and catalytic features, this enzyme has received a lot of attention recently

Laccase Production from Local Biomass Using Solid State Fermentation

The large family of enzymes, known as polyphenols oxidases, includes laccase. Due to the inclusion of a copper atom in their catalytic core, laccases are frequently referred to as multi-copper oxidases. Laccases are versatile enzymes that can catalyze the oxidation of a wide range of phenolic and non-phenolic substances. In the current study, a local strain of Aspergillus niger was used for solid-state fermentation to produce fungal laccase, as well as purify and optimize laccase. The enzyme profile, which was acquired using guaiacol to measure enzyme activity, showed that after five days of incubation, wheat straw provided the highest level of laccase activity, or 2.551 U/mL. A technique called response surface methodology (RSM) was used to examine the effects of various conditions on the production of enzymes. The RSM results demonstrated that after five days of incubation, the enzyme activity was at its highest at 45 °C, pH 5.5, and 30% moisture level, inoculated with 2 mL mycelium. Through ammonium sulphate precipitation and dialysis, the enzyme was purified. Additionally, column chromatography was used to further purify laccase. The next step was enzyme characterization to evaluate how temperature and pH affected enzyme activity. At 45 °C and pH 5.5, the isolated enzyme produced its highest level of activity. The findings of the current study showed that A. niger is capable of producing laccase in an economical and environmentally friendly way. Due to its unique oxidative and catalytic features, this enzyme has received a lot of attention recently.</jats:p

In silico Screening of Some Compounds Derived from the Desert Medicinal Plant Rhazya stricta for Potential Treatment of COVID -19

Abstract The recent emerging SARS-CoV-2 pandemic which was identified as COVID-19 disease has become a global health concern. It resulted in a major pneumonia outbreak worldwide. Currently, there are no approved drugs and several attempts have been made to use computational program approaches in drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. The SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein receptor-binding domain (RBD) is vital for binding to the hACE2 receptor, which initiates entry into human cells, and thus is a key target for antiviral compound development. Many herbal natural products have been proved to exert virucidal activity against the vast majority of pathogenic viruses. Rhazya stricta, a folkloric medicinal desert plant of Saudi Arabia was shown to exhibit bactericidal activity against a verity of pathogens including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and some other Multidrug-Resistant Organisms (MDR’s). This study aims to test for antiviral activity of the folkloric medicinal desert plant Rhazya stricta against coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. We identified three non-alkaloid herbal natural compounds Lig230, Lig434, and Lig68 from Rhazya Stricta that bind and interact significantly with RBD (PDB: I.D. 6M0J) by using virtual screening and computer aiding program Autodock vina. Based on the results of docking scores, molecular docking simulations, RMSD, RMSF, and radius of gyration (Rg), the virtually screened antiviral compounds showed good binding interactions and high stability. Lig230 revealed the highest average of interaction energy during MD simulation (− 417.284 kJ/mol) followed by Lig434 (− 366.186 kJ/mol) and the lowest interaction energy was by Lig68 (− 352.5872 kJ/mol). To evaluate the oral bioavailability, a drug-likeness profile was performed by SwissADME and the results revealed that these compounds expected to confront permeability and solubility difficulties if they were introduced orally. In conclusion, the suggested three compounds can serve as potential anti- SARS-CoV-2 and should be furtherly tested in vitro and in vivo.</jats:p