Low prevalence of Wolbachia infection in Ukrainian populations of Drosophila

Aim. The aim of this study was to determine the Wolbachia infection prevalence among Drosophila species that are common in Ukraine. Methods. The total of 203 imago, representatives of seven Drosophila species collected from seven localities in Ukraine were screened for Wolbachia via PCR assay. Results. We found Wolbachia infection only in one individual of Drosophila testacea that was collected in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. Conclusions. In Ukraine, the examined Drosophila species are characterised by a low prevalence of Wolbachia infection. This research, together with previously reported infections in D. melanogaster and D. simulans populations, indicate that Wolbachia infects 3 out of 9 Drosophila species surveyed in Ukraine

BEER QUALITY ASSURANCE BY CONTROLLING WORT POLYPHENOLIC CONTENT WITH ADSORPTION METHOD

This research explores feasibility of adsorption method used for regulating polypenols content in wort with a view of improving beer quality. It examines adsorption of polyphenols (quercetin, gallic acid, rutin) from pure substance solutions, their mixtures and beer wort treated by sorbents that differ by origin, making, structure and surface chemical composition. The work determines patterns and specific features of polyphenols adsorption with activated carbons. To describe adsorption mechanism more precisely, we specified structure, surface chemical condition, and calculated adsorption parameters using equations of Langmuir, Freundlich and Dubinin-Radushkevich, and the multilayer adsorption theory (BET model). It is demonstrated that polyphenols adsorption mechanism depends on carbon characteristics and is of physical nature that reveals itself in dispersion interaction in micropores and in specific one with oxygen-containing functional group (OFG) on carbon surface. Polyphenol competitive adsorption in mixture and wort recognized. At polyphenols adsorption from model solutions and wort, carbon sorbents are identified to share sufficiently close sorption characteristics. We performed comparative evaluation of quality characteristics of beer produced from activated carbons treated and untreated worts. It is shown that beer samples produced from unhopped wort filtered through semi-coke adsorption, meet regulatory standards requirements of safety by organoleptic, physical and chemical indicators. Moreover, beer obtained from semi-coke treated wort exceeds control sample in terms of organoleptic and stability ensuring indicators

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 science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press