Comparison of combined disc synergy test and double disc synergy test for phenotypic detection of metallo-ß-lactamase among the clinical isolates of gram-negative bacilli

Background: Metallo-β-lactamases (MBL) have a wide spectrum of activity and they confer a higher level of resistance to all β-lactams antibiotics including Carbapenem. The active site in MBLs contains either 1 or 2 Zn2+ ions for their catalytic mechanism. All MBLs share a common feature of being inhibited by EDTA. Metallo-β-lactamase-producing gram-negative bacteria are the most important nosocomial pathogens. The present study was conducted to detect Metallo-β-lactamase (MBL) production in gram-negative bacilli by Combined Disc Synergy Test (CDST) and Double Disc Synergy Test (DDST) with 0.1M EDTA as a chelator and to see their antibiotic susceptibility pattern of them.Methods: The cross-sectional observational study was carried out in the Department of Microbiology, Chittagong Medical College, during the period of July 2015 to June 2016. Samples were collected from patients admitted to CMCH. Standard Microbiological procedures and biochemical tests were carried out for the isolation and identification of MBL. SPSS software is used for data analysis.Results: When 66 screening positive MBL isolates were subjected to the phenotypic confirmatory test CDST detected 50 (25.4%) and DDST detected 48 (24.4%) as MBL producers. Among these isolates, we found Acinetobacter spp. 7 (100%), as the leading MBL producer followed by Pseudomonas spp. 16 (32.6%), E. coli 10 (20%) and Klebsiella spp. 15 (17.4%).Conclusions: In a laboratory where multiplex PCR molecular set-up is not available CDST and DDST are convenient phenotypic methods and can be implemented in routine microbiological laboratories as well as in primary health care setup for daily application to monitor the production of MBLs

JMJD5 is a human arginyl C-3 hydroxylase.

Oxygenase-catalysed post-translational modifications of basic protein residues, including lysyl hydroxylations and Nε-methyl lysyl demethylations, have important cellular roles. Jumonji-C (JmjC) domain-containing protein 5 (JMJD5), which genetic studies reveal is essential in animal development, is reported as a histone Nε-methyl lysine demethylase (KDM). Here we report how extensive screening with peptides based on JMJD5 interacting proteins led to the finding that JMJD5 catalyses stereoselective C-3 hydroxylation of arginine residues in sequences from human regulator of chromosome condensation domain-containing protein 1 (RCCD1) and ribosomal protein S6 (RPS6). High-resolution crystallographic analyses reveal overall fold, active site and substrate binding/product release features supporting the assignment of JMJD5 as an arginine hydroxylase rather than a KDM. The results will be useful in the development of selective oxygenase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer and genetic diseases

Relationship between weather variables and new daily covid-19 cases in Dhaka, Bangladesh

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The present study investigated the relationship between the transmission of COVID-19 infections and climate indicators in Dhaka, Bangladesh, using coronavirus infections data available from the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), Bangladesh. The Spearman rank correlation test was carried out to study the association of seven climate indicators, including humidity, air quality, minimum temperature, precipitation, maximum temperature, mean temperature, and wind speed with the COVID-19 outbreak in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The study found that, among the seven indicators, only two indicators (minimum temperature and average temperature) had a significant relationship with new COVID-19 cases. The study also found that air quality index (AQI) had a strong negative correlation with cumulative cases of COVID-19 in Dhaka city. The results of this paper will give health regulators and policymakers valuable information to lessen the COVID-19 spread in Dhaka and other countries around the world

Efficacy of pre- and post-emergence herbicide combinations on weed control in no-till mechanically transplanted rice

No-till mechanized-transplanted rice was evaluated for different combinations of pre- and post-emergence herbicides to determine feasible, economically viable weed management options to control complex weed flora in rice fields. All pre-emergence herbicides significantly reduced the population of grassy weeds; of these, pendimethalin resulted in the greatest reductions (83%) at 15 days after transplanting (DAT). Among five post-emergence herbicide treatments, the combination of bispyribac-sodium (10%SP) + pyrazosulfuron (10%WP) was found to be the most effective in controlling all weed flora at both 35 and 55 DAT. The sequential application of pendimethalin (pre-emergence) followed bispyribac-sodium + pyrazosulfuron (post-emergence) resulted in significantly higher rice grain yield (4.4 t-ha−1) and relative gross-margin (417 USD-ha−1) than all other treatments. A strong negative correlation was observed between rice grain yield and weed biomass, and a strong positive correlation between rice grain yield and weed control efficiency. Our findings demonstrate the potential to combine pre- and post-emergence herbicides in no-till mechanized-transplanted rice; these findings have applications globally in regions where rice is established by no-till or mechanized transplanting

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

Globular domain structure and function of restriction-like-endonuclease LINEs: similarities to eukaryotic splicing factor Prp8

Abstract Background R2 elements are a clade of early branching Long Interspersed Elements (LINEs). LINEs are retrotransposable elements whose replication can have profound effects on the genomes in which they reside. No crystal or EM structures exist for the reverse transcriptase (RT) and linker regions of LINEs. Results Using limited proteolysis as a probe for globular domain structure, we show that the protein encoded by the Bombyx mori R2 element has two major globular domains: (1) a small globular domain consisting of the N-terminal zinc finger and Myb motifs, and (2) a large globular domain consisting of the RT, linker, and type II restriction-like endonuclease (RLE). Further digestion of the large globular domain occurred within the RT. Mapping these RT cleavages onto an updated model of the R2Bm RT indicated that the thumb of the RT was largely protected from proteolytic cleavage. The crystal structure of the large globular domain of Prp8, a eukaryotic splicing factor, was a major template used in building the R2Bm RT model, particularly the thumb region. The large fragment of Prp8 consists not only of a RT similar to R2Bm, but also an RLE and a linker connecting the two regions. The linker sequences adjacent to the RLE in LINEs and Prp8 share a set of two important α-helices and a (presumptive) knuckle/ββα structural motif that are closely associated with the thumb. The RLEs of LINEs and Prp8 share a unique catalytic core residue spacing as well as other key residues. Conclusions The protein encoded by RLE LINEs consists of two major globular domains. The larger of the two globular domain contains the RT, linker, and RLE and is similar to the large fragment of the spliceosomal protein Prp8. The similarities are suggestive of possible common ancestry

Le Courrier

24 mars 18361836/03/24 (N83)

Additional file 4: of Globular domain structure and function of restriction-like-endonuclease LINEs: similarities to eukaryotic splicing factor Prp8

Glu C mapping data (internal peptides). (PDF 541 kb

Additional file 5: of Globular domain structure and function of restriction-like-endonuclease LINEs: similarities to eukaryotic splicing factor Prp8

List of Glu C and Lys C sites with early vs. later designations. (XLSX 482 kb

BONIK: A Blockchain Empowered Chatbot for Financial Transactions

A Chatbot is a popular platform to enable users to interact with a software or website to gather information or execute actions in an automated fashion. In recent years, chatbots are being used for executing financial transactions, however, there are a number of security issues, such as secure authentication, data integrity, system availability and transparency, that must be carefully handled for their wide-scale adoption. Recently, the blockchain technology, with a number of security advantages, has emerged as one of the foundational technologies with the potential to disrupt a number of application domains, particularly in the financial sector. In this paper, we forward the idea of integrating a chatbot with blockchain technology in the view to improve the security issues in financial chatbots. More specifically, we present BONIK, a blockchain empowered chatbot for financial transactions, and discuss its architecture and design choices. Furthermore, we explore the developed Proof-of-Concept (PoC), evaluate its performance, analyse how different security and privacy issues are mitigated using BONIK.Peer reviewe