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Carvalho, G.V.; Cabral, M.M.; de Oliveira, A.L.S.C.; Garção, H.F., and Pellegrini, J.A.C., 2020. Methodology to evaluate the coastal susceptibility to oil spills originated in large marine areas – Costa Norte Project. In: Malvárez, G. and Navas, F. (eds.), Global Coastal Issues of 2020. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 95, pp. 1344–1348. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Within Costa Norte Project – an R&D project focused on improving the understanding of the vulnerability of mangrove forests to oil spills in the Brazilian Equatorial Margin - the vulnerability concept is understood as composed by three factors: sensitivity, resiliency, and susceptibility. The latter is defined as the exposure level to oil spills and should consider all possible sources of this pollutant. This work presents a methodology to assess the susceptibility of an asset to oil spills that may occur anywhere within a large marine area. It benefits from the development of a multi-source stochastic oil dispersion algorithm to enable the modeling of oil spills originated from hundreds of sources and the development of a methodology to integrate multiple scales with increasingly higher resolutions. Once stored, the results allow the identification of susceptible areas considering a single or a subset of spill sources and the identification of potential origins of spills that may affect specific areas. The choices of the spill sources and the coastal areas to be considered are defined during post-processing, granting flexibility and interactivity exploring the results. The developed methodology presents the potential to assist public management and is illustrated by an offshore scale simulation considering 1,138 oil spill sources distributed along the Brazilian Equatorial Margin integrated to an estuarine scale model, forced by 1-year of metocean data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As polyphenolic compounds isolated from plants extracts, flavonoids have been applied to various pharmaceutical uses in recent decades due to their anti-inflammatory, cancer preventive, and cardiovascular protective activities. In this study, we evaluated the effects of the flavonoid quercetin on Crotalus durissus terrificus secretory phospholipase A2 (sPLA2), an important protein involved in the release of arachidonic acid from phospholipid membranes. The protein was chemically modified by treatment with quercetin, which resulted in modifications in the secondary structure as evidenced through circular dichroism. In addition, quercetin was able to inhibit the enzymatic activity and some pharmacological activities of sPLA2, including its antibacterial activity, its ability to induce platelet aggregation, and its myotoxicity by approximately 40%, but was not able to reduce the inflammatory and neurotoxic activities of sPLA2. These results suggest the existence of two pharmacological sites in the protein, one that is correlated with the enzymatic site and another that is distinct from it. We also performed molecular docking to better understand the possible interactions between quercetin and sPLA2. Our docking data showed the existence of hydrogen-bonded, polar interactions and hydrophobic interactions, suggesting that other flavonoids with similar structures could bind to sPLA2. Further research is warranted to investigate the potential use of flavonoids as sPLA2 inhibitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]