Epidemiological determinants and PCR results in Central African inhabitants with a new and frequent HTLV indeterminate Western Blot pattern exhibiting mostly p28, p32, p36, and a shifted GD21

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Human Herpesvirus 8, Southern Siberia

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Palaeotectonic setting of the south-eastern Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier, West Africa: new insights from igneous trace element geochemistry and U-Pb zircon ages

New U-Pb zircon ages and geochemistry from the eastern Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier are presented and integrated with published data to generate a revised tectonic framework for the westernmost Birimian terranes. The Falémé Volcanic Belt and Kofi Series are highly prospective, hosting several multi-million ounce gold deposits and a significant iron ore resource, but remain under-researched. It is therefore important to constrain the fundamental geological setting. The igneous rocks of the eastern Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier are dominantly of high-K calc-alkaline affinity, with fractionated REE patterns and negative Nb-Ta anomalies. The plutonic rocks in the Falémé Belt are dioritic to granodioritic in composition, with moderately fractionated REE patterns and metaluminous A/CNK signatures. Felsic, peraluminous granite stocks, dykes and plutons with fractionated REE patterns and negative Eu, Ti and P anomalies intruded both the Falémé Belt and Kofi Series. Albitisation masks the affinity of some units, although use of the Th-Co diagram shows that prior to albitisation, all igneous units belonged to the high-K calc-alkaline series. New U-Pb age data for the Boboti and Balangouma plutons indicate crystallisation at 2088.5 ± 8.5 Ma and at 2112 ± 13 Ma, respectively. Inherited zircons in the Boboti pluton indicate magmatic activity in the Falémé Belt at 2218 ± 83 Ma coincided with the oldest dated units in the Mako Belt to the West. Systematic changes in Dy/Yb, Sm/La, Nb/Zr, Rb concentration, Eu-anomaly and ɛNdt over ∼200 Ma reveal that the tectonic setting in the KKI evolved from a volcanic island arc environment to an active continental margin. Crustal thickening, as a result of a shift to collisional tectonic setting, combined with magmatic differentiation, led to the generation of peraluminous, granitic melts with a significant crustal component. A small suite of more basic intrusive and extrusive rocks on the eastern margin of the Dialé-Daléma basin are highly metaluminous and display limited LILE enrichment, with normalised HREE values close to unity. The Daléma igneous rocks may have formed in an extensional back arc, related to the arc system

Firefly distribution and abundance on mangrove vegetation assemblages in Sepetang estuary, Peninsular Malaysia

Pteroptyx fireflies are commonly reported to congregate in large numbers in mangroves. Not much is known about the relationships between firefly distribution and abundance with specific mangrove vegetation assemblages. We conducted a study to investigate the vegetation assemblages that structure the distribution and abundance of Pteroptyx tener in Peninsular Malaysia. The distribution and abundance of fireflies were assessed along an 8 km stretch of mangroves in Sepetang estuary using visual assessment. Statistical analysis was carried out to test the correlation between length of display section and percentage cover of P. tener colonies and the relationship between percentage cover of fireflies with different vegetation assemblages. Five distinct vegetation assemblages were identified comprising different combination of four mangrove species. It was found that shorter display sections had higher percentage cover of P. tener colonies. In addition, vegetation assemblage which consisting of mainly Sonneratia caseolaris and Nypa fruticans was the most preferred type. The results of this study point to the necessity to consider not only a single mangrove species but the entire vegetation assemblage for firefly conservation

DisProt: intrinsic protein disorder annotation in 2020

The Database of Protein Disorder (DisProt, URL: https://disprot.org) provides manually curated annotations of intrinsically disordered proteins from the literature. Here we report recent developments with DisProt (version 8), including the doubling of protein entries, a new disorder ontology, improvements of the annotation format and a completely new website. The website includes a redesigned graphical interface, a better search engine, a clearer API for programmatic access and a new annotation interface that integrates text mining technologies. The new entry format provides a greater flexibility, simplifies maintenance and allows the capture of more information from the literature. The new disorder ontology has been formalized and made interoperable by adopting the OWL format, as well as its structure and term definitions have been improved. The new annotation interface has made the curation process faster and more effective. We recently showed that new DisProt annotations can be effectively used to train and validate disorder predictors. We believe the growth of DisProt will accelerate, contributing to the improvement of function and disorder predictors and therefore to illuminate the ‘dark’ proteome

Critical assessment of protein intrinsic disorder prediction

Abstract: Intrinsically disordered proteins, defying the traditional protein structure–function paradigm, are a challenge to study experimentally. Because a large part of our knowledge rests on computational predictions, it is crucial that their accuracy is high. The Critical Assessment of protein Intrinsic Disorder prediction (CAID) experiment was established as a community-based blind test to determine the state of the art in prediction of intrinsically disordered regions and the subset of residues involved in binding. A total of 43 methods were evaluated on a dataset of 646 proteins from DisProt. The best methods use deep learning techniques and notably outperform physicochemical methods. The top disorder predictor has Fmax = 0.483 on the full dataset and Fmax = 0.792 following filtering out of bona fide structured regions. Disordered binding regions remain hard to predict, with Fmax = 0.231. Interestingly, computing times among methods can vary by up to four orders of magnitude

Radium behaviour during ferric oxi-hydroxides ageing

In uranium mill tailings, oxides and oxi-hydroxides are responsible of about 70% of the radium immobilization, half being associated to amorphous forms (mainly iron and manganese oxides/oxi-hydroxides). With time, crystallization of these amorphous forms can occur, inducing a redistribution of radium between solids and solution. If the amount of mobile radium increases, the impact of these tailings on the environment may become significant. The aim of this study is to determine the amount of 226Ra released in solution during the crystallization process of hydrous ferric oxi-hydroxide (HFO) containing 226Ra. A reproducible co-precipitation procedure is developed. The transformation of Ra-HFO co-precipitate in crystallized forms (goethite, hematite, ...) is studied by ageing amorphous solids at 40$^{\circ}$C in different solutions. After co-precipitation, about 20% of the initial 226Ra present in solution is associated to amorphous HFO. At 40$^{\circ}$C, whatever the solution composition (MES or NaClO4), the solid evolution is very slow and, after 3-5 months, no significant amount of crystalline form is noticeable. Simultaneously, the amount of 226Ra present in solution is constant in MES and NaClO4 medium. In comparison, 226Ra sorption shows off inclusion of 226Ra in Ra-HFO precipitate

Determination of 226Ra in solid samples of few milligrams after mineralisation and measurement by solid scintillation

International audienceA protocol is proposed for the measurement of 226Ra on 150 mg of solid sample without radiochemistry. To evaluate the performance of this method, standard samples were used and the results were in good agreement with reference values. The detection limit obtained is about 130 Bq kg−1 (dry weight) without mineralised solution concentration by evaporation. A concentration of the solution by 4 and/or an increase of sample mass by 4 in the case of microwave digestion system, allows achieving a detection limit of 30 Bq kg−1 (dry weight) and thus measuring 226Ra in most soils. This method could also be used for NORM sites on soil and sediment samples. © 2017, Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary

Experimental study of radon production and transport in an analogue for the Martian regolith

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