Reprogramming of Trypanosoma cruzi metabolism triggered by parasite interaction with the host cell extracellular matrix.

Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas' disease, affects 8 million people predominantly living in socioeconomic underdeveloped areas. T. cruzi trypomastigotes (Ty), the classical infective stage, interact with the extracellular matrix (ECM), an obligatory step before invasion of almost all mammalian cells in different tissues. Here we have characterized the proteome and phosphoproteome of T. cruzi trypomastigotes upon interaction with ECM (MTy) and the data are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD010970. Proteins involved with metabolic processes (such as the glycolytic pathway), kinases, flagellum and microtubule related proteins, transport-associated proteins and RNA/DNA binding elements are highly represented in the pool of proteins modified by phosphorylation. Further, important metabolic switches triggered by this interaction with ECM were indicated by decreases in the phosphorylation of hexokinase, phosphofructokinase, fructose-2,6-bisphosphatase, phosphoglucomutase, phosphoglycerate kinase in MTy. Concomitantly, a decrease in the pyruvate and lactate and an increase of glucose and succinate contents were detected by GC-MS. These observations led us to focus on the changes in the glycolytic pathway upon binding of the parasite to the ECM. Inhibition of hexokinase, pyruvate kinase and lactate dehydrogenase activities in MTy were observed and this correlated with the phosphorylation levels of the respective enzymes. Putative kinases involved in protein phosphorylation altered upon parasite incubation with ECM were suggested by in silico analysis. Taken together, our results show that in addition to cytoskeletal changes and protease activation, a reprogramming of the trypomastigote metabolism is triggered by the interaction of the parasite with the ECM prior to cell invasion and differentiation into amastigotes, the multiplicative intracellular stage of T. cruzi in the vertebrate host

Simultaneous Optimization of Both Node and Edge Conservation in Network Alignment via WAVE

Network alignment can be used to transfer functional knowledge between conserved regions of different networks. Typically, existing methods use a node cost function (NCF) to compute similarity between nodes in different networks and an alignment strategy (AS) to find high-scoring alignments with respect to the total NCF over all aligned nodes (or node conservation). But, they then evaluate quality of their alignments via some other measure that is different than the node conservation measure used to guide the alignment construction process. Typically, one measures the amount of conserved edges, but only after alignments are produced. Hence, a recent attempt aimed to directly maximize the amount of conserved edges while constructing alignments, which improved alignment accuracy. Here, we aim to directly maximize both node and edge conservation during alignment construction to further improve alignment accuracy. For this, we design a novel measure of edge conservation that (unlike existing measures that treat each conserved edge the same) weighs each conserved edge so that edges with highly NCF-similar end nodes are favored. As a result, we introduce a novel AS, Weighted Alignment VotEr (WAVE), which can optimize any measures of node and edge conservation, and which can be used with any NCF or combination of multiple NCFs. Using WAVE on top of established state-of-the-art NCFs leads to superior alignments compared to the existing methods that optimize only node conservation or only edge conservation or that treat each conserved edge the same. And while we evaluate WAVE in the computational biology domain, it is easily applicable in any domain.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Knowledge and behaviors regarding salt intake in Mozambique

Background/objectives: Health education and regulatory measures may contribute to lower population salt intake. Therefore, we aimed to describe knowledge and behaviors related to salt intake in Mozambique. Subjects/methods: A cross-sectional evaluation of a representative sample of the population aged 15–64 years (n = 3116) was conducted in 2014/2015, following the Stepwise Approach to Chronic Disease Risk Factor Surveillance, including a 12-question module for evaluation of dietary salt. Results: Three dimensions were identified in the questionnaire, named “self-reported salt intake”, “knowledge of health effects of salt intake”, and “behaviors for control of salt intake”. A total of 7.4% of the participants perceived that they consumed too much/far too much salt and 25.9% reported adding salt/salty seasoning often/always to prepared foods. The proportion considering that it was not important to decrease the salt contents of their diet was 8%, and 16.9% were not aware that high salt intake could be deleterious for health. Prevalences of lack of behaviors for reducing salt intake ranged from 74.9% for not limiting consumption of processed foods, to 95% for not buying low salt alternatives. There were few differences according to socio-demographic variables, but awareness of hypertension was, in general, associated with better knowledge and less frequent behaviors likely to contribute to a high salt intake. Conclusions: Most Mozambicans were aware that high salt intake can cause health problems, but the self-reported salt intake and behaviors for its control show an ample margin for improvement. This study provides evidence to guide population level salt-reducing policies

Mapping the Risk of Anaemia in Preschool-Age Children: The Contribution of Malnutrition, Malaria, and Helminth Infections in West Africa

Ricardo Soares Magalhães and colleagues used national cross-sectional household-based demographic health surveys to map the distribution of anemia risk in preschool children in Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Mali