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Finding, exploring and filtering frequent sentence-based associations between a disease and a biomedical entity, co-mentioned in disease-related PubMed literature, is a challenge, as the volume of publications increases. Darling is a web application, which utilizes Name Entity Recognition to identify human-related biomedical terms in PubMed articles, mentioned in OMIM, DisGeNET and Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) disease records, and generates an interactive biomedical entity association network. Nodes in this network represent genes, proteins, chemicals, functions, tissues, diseases, environments and phenotypes. Users can search by identifiers, terms/entities or free text and explore the relevant abstracts in an annotated format. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

ackground: Vertical transmission of Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) is the primary infection source for infants, but little is known on the proportion of children that have acquired HBV from their mothers. Objective: We investigated the relationship of HBV sequencing in HBVpositive children and their mothers and explored the HBV phylogenetic tree. Methods: Serum-extracted HBV-DNA from 38 individuals (13 children paired to nine mothers, 16 unpaired infected children) was amplified by polymerase chain reaction and the target region HBV surface glycoprotein (amino acids 40-171) was directly sequenced. Following editing and alignment of these sequences, phylogenetic tree analysis was performed using the neighbourjoining and maximum-likelihood methods. Results: Analysis was successfully performed in 29 subjects (23 children and six mothers), including six mother-child pairs. All individuals were infected by genotype D. Subgenotype adw3 prevailed (21, 72.4%), followed by ayw2 (4, 13.8%) and ayw3 (4, 13.8%). Among six mother-child pairs, three had identical and three had different subgenotypes. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that HBV sequences from three children did not cluster with their siblings suggesting a different source of infection. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that HBV subgenotypes in infected children may not be identical to their mothers’ and point to non-vertical HBV transmission in childhood.

The provenance of ceramic artefacts is one of the fundamental issues in ceramic analysis and is related to the location a ceramic object was produced or manufactured. This, in turn, refers to the clay source from where the ancient potter exploited their ceramic raw material. Being aware of the local geology is crucial to the identification of potential raw materials for the ceramic manufacturing. Thorough examination of clays in terms of composition, plastic behavior, shrinkage and particle size, is necessary for the evaluation of their suitability for ceramic production. A combination of several analytical techniques can contribute to the iden-tification and characterization of a ceramic raw material. The choice of the proper ones depends on different factors, such as precision, cost, time, expertise, availability and the way a researcher would combine them. The present study aims to unfold the criteria of clay sampling and investigate the appropriateness of the most relevant analytical techniques for the fully characterization of ceramic raw materials and thereafter provenance of ceramics made from them.

The in-depth study of protein–protein interactions (PPIs) is of key importance for understanding how cells operate. Therefore, in the past few years, many experimental as well as computational approaches have been developed for the identification and discovery of such interactions. Here, we present UniReD, a user-friendly, computational prediction tool which analyses biomedical literature in order to extract known protein associations and suggest undocumented ones. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate its usefulness by experimentally validating six predicted interactions and by benchmarking it against public databases of experimentally validated PPIs succeeding a high coverage. We believe that UniReD can become an important and intuitive resource for experimental biologists in their quest for finding novel associations within a protein network and a useful tool to complement experimental approaches (e.g. mass spectrometry) by producing sorted lists of candidate proteins for further experimental validation. UniReD is available at http://bioinformatics.med.uoc.gr/unired/. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics.

International audience; Realistic breast phantoms are often required for supporting the development of microwave and mm-wave imaging systems for breast cancer detection. A number of phantoms have been proposed in the literature, but they are often realized using non-common or toxic materials, and characterized only for the microwave regime. Recently, mm-waves have been also proposed for screening purposes, especially for breast with a high fat content, to provide the resolution vital to detect early-stage cancer masses. Consequently, we proposed several recipes that can be used to create tissue-mimicking materials able to reflect the dielectric properties of different human breast tissues, from fat to neoplastic tissues. In this paper, we present new recipes specifically conceived to mimic up to 50 GHz the dielectric properties of very fat tissues, difficult to achieve otherwise. The involved materials are deionized water, sunflower oil, waste-oil hardener, and two different surfactants (lecithin and Polysorbate 80), all very cheap, easy-to-manage, not-toxic and common materials.

New geological and structural mapping combined with kinematic and amphibole chemistry analyses is used to investigate the deformation history of the Cycladic Blueschist Unit (CBU) on Sifnos Island (Cyclades, Aegean Sea). We concentrate on north Sifnos, an area characterized by exceptionally well-preserved eclogites and blueschists. Our data show that the early, main phase (D2) of ductile deformation in the CBU occurred synchronous with the transition from prograde to close-to-peak retrograde conditions. This deformation phase took place at middle Eocene and is related to ESE-directed thrusting that emplaced the metavolcano-sedimentary subunit over the Marble subunit. The subsequent exhumation-related (D3) deformation is characterized by gently NE-plunging folds and NE-directed contractional shear zones that formed parallel to the axial planes of folds. NE-directed shearing occurred under blue- schist and transitional blueschist-/greenschist-facies conditions during late Eocene–Oligocene and caused the restacking of the early nappe pile. We suggest that a mechanism of ductile extrusion of the CBU in a tectonic setting of net compression could explain better the recorded exhumation-related deformation than a mechanism of syn- and post-orogenic extension. Our new kinematic results in combination with previous works in the Cyclades area reveal a regional scale change in tectonic transport direction from (W)NW–(E)SE at Late Cretaceous–middle Eocene to (E)NE–(W)SW at late Eocene–Oligocene times. The observed change in transport direction may be governed by the relative motion of Africa with respect to Europe during Alpine orogeny.

The aim of this paper is to provide well-stated petrographic reference groups for the recognition of several Sicilian and Spanish Phoenician-Punic production centres in order to facilitate an instrument of further objective support for amphorae provenance. This instrument is based on the crosschecking between data provided by typological studies and the thinsection analysis of amphorae fabrics. It is worth noting that this is only a first step within the framework of a larger research project focused in the creation of an Atlas of Phoenician and Punic Amphorae in the Western Mediterranean including both archaeological and petrographic data. In this context a systematical work on the known production centres characterizing fabrics, pastes and raw materials is the proper way to define workshops and their manufactures and to study their technological choices. Thus we shall give primarily references to well-define workshops as Mozya and Solunto in Sicily and Cadiz and Ebussus in Spain. However, some other petrographic data not obtained from the above cited workshops are also included. In those cases, the reference fabric has to be taken only as a general trend on the petrographic features of a certain large compositional space.