Prospects for cooling of marine organisms with the ice using chitosan and its polyelectrolyte complexes

A new cooling medium for storage of fish and seafood is proposed - frozen water solution of polysaccharides of natural origin, as the natural biopolymer chitosan. Rational concentration of its solution for producing the chitosan ice is determined experimentally. Organoleptic, physical, and microbiological parameters of the ice prepared from solution of polyelectrolyte complexes of chitosan and its co-polymers are examined. Better results for cooling of marine raw materials are shown for the solution of polyelectrolyte complexes based on chitosan with sodium alginate and carboxymethyl cellulose. The chitosan-alginate ice is distinguished by higher density and homogeneous consistency within the temperature range from -5 to +5оC. Antiseptic microbiological activity of the chitosan-alginate ice is in 2.3 times higher as compared with the water ice and in 1.8 times higher than for the chitosan ice. High technological properties of the ice of polyelectrolyte complexes of chitosan with sodium alginate provide good prospects for its using in technology of cooling in fishery industry

ПАТРИОТИЗМ В СИСТЕМЕ ИНТЕРЕСОВ СОВРЕМЕННОГО ЧЕЛОВЕКА

The social and economic role of patriotismin the socio-economic progress of Russiais considered in the article. The comparative analysis of technologies of formation ofpatriotism in the United States, Israel andFrance is provided. The role of the general and vocational education system in this process is defined. The system of measures to mainstream the patriotism of the populationof Russia is proposed.Рассмотрена социальная и экономическая роль патриотизма в социальноэкономическом прогрессе России. Дан сравнительный анализ технологий формированияпатриотизмавСША, Израиле, Франции. Обозначена роль системы общегоипрофессиональногообразованияв этомпроцессе. Предложенасистемамер по актуализации патриотизма населения Росси

Ecological and economic mechanism for the formation of environmental measures in the gas extraction constructions

The disturbed balance of the “society-nature” system has led to the fact that the production of output usually involves environmental pollution. The reason is that most technological processes are far from perfect and involve formation of intermediate substances or end products that do not participate in further production process and consequently become waste. Therefore, the authors analyze the methodological approaches of integrated environmental and economic assessment of environment protection measures during the construction of gas industry facilities, which is a relevant issue in terms of ecology. The authors claim that the extraction of fuel and energy resources disrupt the biogeocoenosises’ components during the survey, development and exploitation of deposits, leading to the manifestation of dangerous natural management processes and destruction of flora and fauna. Therefore, the environmental-economic mechanism for the formation of environmental measures during the construction of gas facilities should be improved within the framework of the strategy of sustainable economic development of society and ensuring its environmental safety. Analysis of methods for assessing the environmental and economic impact of gas industry enterprises on the environment has shown that enterprises need further instrumental and methodological improvement

Gene-centric coverage of the human liver transcriptome: QPCR, Illumina, and Oxford Nanopore RNA-Seq

It has been shown that the best coverage of the HepG2 cell line transcriptome encoded by genes of a single chromosome, chromosome 18, is achieved by a combination of two sequencing platforms, Illumina RNA-Seq and Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT), using cut-off levels of FPKM > 0 and TPM > 0, respectively. In this study, we investigated the extent to which the combination of these transcriptomic analysis methods makes it possible to achieve a high coverage of the transcriptome encoded by the genes of other human chromosomes. A comparative analysis of transcriptome coverage for various types of biological material was carried out, and the HepG2 cell line transcriptome was compared with the transcriptome of liver tissue cells. In addition, the contribution of variability in the coverage of expressed genes in human transcriptomes to the creation of a draft human transcriptome was evaluated. For human liver tissues, ONT makes an extremely insignificant contribution to the overall coverage of the transcriptome. Thus, to ensure maximum coverage of the liver tissue transcriptome, it is sufficient to apply only one technology: Illumina RNA-Seq (FPKM > 0)

The Size of the Human Proteome: The Width and Depth

This work discusses bioinformatics and experimental approaches to explore the human proteome, a constellation of proteins expressed in different tissues and organs. As the human proteome is not a static entity, it seems necessary to estimate the number of different protein species (proteoforms) and measure the number of copies of the same protein in a specific tissue. Here, meta-analysis of neXtProt knowledge base is proposed for theoretical prediction of the number of different proteoforms that arise from alternative splicing (AS), single amino acid polymorphisms (SAPs), and posttranslational modifications (PTMs). Three possible cases are considered: (1) PTMs and SAPs appear exclusively in the canonical sequences of proteins, but not in splice variants; (2) PTMs and SAPs can occur in both proteins encoded by canonical sequences and in splice variants; (3) all modification types (AS, SAP, and PTM) occur as independent events. Experimental validation of proteoforms is limited by the analytical sensitivity of proteomic technology. A bell-shaped distribution histogram was generated for proteins encoded by a single chromosome, with the estimation of copy numbers in plasma, liver, and HepG2 cell line. The proposed metabioinformatics approaches can be used for estimation of the number of different proteoforms for any group of protein-coding genes

The efficacy of the combination of eribulin and trastuzumab in advanced HER2-positive breast cancer: the results of Russian observational study

The article presents the experience of 19 Russian medical institutions on the use of eribulin in combination with trastuzumab in various treatment lines of metastatic HER2+ breast cancer in routine clinical practice. Aim. The main objective of this retrospective observational study was to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of eribulin and trastuzumab combo in HER2+ breast cancer patients pretreated with anthracyclines and taxanes. The analysis included 60 patients who received at least 2 cycles of eribulin in combination with trastuzumab. 2 patients (3.3%) received treatment as the 1st line, as the 2nd 14 (23.3%), as the 3rd 16 (26.7%), and as the 4th and more 28 (46.7%). Materials and methods. Complete response was achieved in 2 (3.3%) patients, partial response in 9 (15%), stable disease in 33 (55%), stabilization for more than 6 months in 11 (18.3%), disease progression was detected in 16 (26.7%) patients. The objective response rate was 18.3% in the whole group, the clinical benefit rate 36.7%. Results. The objective response rate in the group of the luminal subtype (ER/PR+HER2+) was 26.9%, in HER2-overexpressed subtype (ER-PR-HER2+) 8.8% and 64.7%, respectively, disease progression was recorded 2.3 times more often 35.3% versus 15.5% in the luminal subtype group. The median progression-free survival in patients with HER2+ breast cancer was 4.95 months (95% confidence interval CI 3.048.29 months), in luminal subtype 6.38 months (95% CI 3.338.54 months), in non-luminal 4.44 months (95% CI 2.47.96 months); p=0.306. The treatment was well tolerated, the spectrum of adverse events corresponded to the eribulin toxicity profile. Conclusions. The uniqueness of this study lies in the fact that on a large clinical material from the standpoint of real clinical practice, a very promising treatment regimen that is not used routinely in a number of countries has been studied, its effectiveness and satisfactory tolerance have been confirmed

Effective transcription factor binding site prediction using a combination of optimization, a genetic algorithm and discriminant analysis to capture distant interactions

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Reliable transcription factor binding site (TFBS) prediction methods are essential for computer annotation of large amount of genome sequence data. However, current methods to predict TFBSs are hampered by the high false-positive rates that occur when only sequence conservation at the core binding-sites is considered.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>To improve this situation, we have quantified the performance of several Position Weight Matrix (PWM) algorithms, using exhaustive approaches to find their optimal length and position. We applied these approaches to bio-medically important TFBSs involved in the regulation of cell growth and proliferation as well as in inflammatory, immune, and antiviral responses (NF-κB, ISGF3, IRF1, STAT1), obesity and lipid metabolism (PPAR, SREBP, HNF4), regulation of the steroidogenic (SF-1) and cell cycle (E2F) genes expression. We have also gained extra specificity using a method, entitled SiteGA, which takes into account structural interactions within TFBS core and flanking regions, using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a discriminant function of locally positioned dinucleotide (LPD) frequencies.</p> <p>To ensure a higher confidence in our approach, we applied resampling-jackknife and bootstrap tests for the comparison, it appears that, optimized PWM and SiteGA have shown similar recognition performances. Then we applied SiteGA and optimized PWMs (both separately and together) to sequences in the Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD). The resulting SiteGA recognition models can now be used to search sequences for BSs using the web tool, SiteGA.</p> <p>Analysis of dependencies between close and distant LPDs revealed by SiteGA models has shown that the most significant correlations are between close LPDs, and are generally located in the core (footprint) region. A greater number of less significant correlations are mainly between distant LPDs, which spanned both core and flanking regions. When SiteGA and optimized PWM models were applied together, this substantially reduced false positives at least at higher stringencies.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Based on this analysis, SiteGA adds substantial specificity even to optimized PWMs and may be considered for large-scale genome analysis. It adds to the range of techniques available for TFBS prediction, and EPD analysis has led to a list of genes which appear to be regulated by the above TFs.</p