Sec In Presence Research Articles

ShellCoat, a Calcinated Calcium Solution, Effectively Inactivates SARS-CoV-2.

SARS-CoV-2, an acute respiratory syndrome-causing virus, suddenly emerged at the end of 2019 in China, and rapidly spread all over the world. In this study, we examined whether a calcinated calcium solution (ShellCoat) , which has been approved as a food additive in Japan can inactivate SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, antiviral activity of ShellCoat against SARS-CoV-2 was also evaluated in the presence of organic matter, namely, fetal bovine serum (FBS) . When concentrated SARS-CoV-2 were treated with ShellCoat for 10 sec in presence or absence of FBS as organic matters, the viral titer was decreased more than 4 logs 50% tissue culture infective dose per mL (TCID50/mL) but use of ShellCoat for 20 sec or more under similar experimental conditions the viral titer was below the detection limit (≦2.1 logs TCID50/mL) . These results clearly indicate that the ShellCoat is a powerful antiviral agent against SARS-CoV-2 even in the presence of organic matters.

Urchin-like Cobalt Nanostructures For Catalytic Degradation Of Nitro Anilines

The undertaken study describes synthesis of urchin-like Cobalt nanostructures (Co NSs) in aqueous solution using gallic acid as both reductant and protecting agent for the catalytic degradation of 4-methyle-2-nitroaniline. UV-Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy was used as a primary tool to elaborately study and optimizes the necessary experimental condition for the developed synthetic protocol Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy showed the interaction between gallic acid and the surface of Co NSs via -OH linkages although Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) confirmed the formation of urchin shaped nanostructures with diameter in the range of 80-110 nm and length of tentacles between 1.0 - 1.8 µm. The as-synthesized Co NSs proved to be excellent heterogeneous catalyst for the 100 % reductive degradation of 4-methyle-2-nitroaniline in just 60 sec in presence of reductant (NaBH4) with reaction rate calculated to follow pseudo first order kinetic and rate constant of 0.055s -1 . Furthermore, Co NSs, showed excellent recyclability and were reused four times for the degradation of 4-methyle-2- nitroaniline with efficiency that displayed negligible catalytic poisoning. Copyright © 2016 VBRI Press.

Selenoprofiles: profile-based scanning of eukaryotic genome sequences for selenoprotein genes

Motivation: Selenoproteins are a group of proteins that contain selenocysteine (Sec), a rare amino acid inserted co-translationally into the protein chain. The Sec codon is UGA, which is normally a stop codon. In selenoproteins, UGA is recoded to Sec in presence of specific features on selenoprotein gene transcripts. Due to the dual role of the UGA codon, selenoprotein prediction and annotation are difficult tasks, and even known selenoproteins are often misannotated in genome databases.Results: We present an homology-based in silico method to scan genomes for members of the known eukaryotic selenoprotein families: selenoprofiles. The core of the method is a set of manually curated highly reliable multiple sequence alignments of selenoprotein families, which are used as queries to scan genomic sequences. Results of the scan are processed through a number of steps, to produce highly accurate predictions of selenoprotein genes with little or no human intervention. Selenoprofiles is a valuable tool for bioinformatic characterization of eukaryotic selenoproteomes, and can complement genome annotation pipelines.Availability and Implementation: Selenoprofiles is a python-built pipeline that internally runs psitblastn, exonerate, genewise, SECISearch and a number of custom-made scripts and programs. The program is available at http://big.crg.cat/services/selenoprofiles. The predictions presented in this article are available through DAS at http://genome.crg.cat:9000/das/Selenoprofiles_ensembl.Contact: marco.mariotti@crg.esSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.