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Noncommunicable disease (NCD) causes about 35 million deaths and accounts for 60% of all deaths, of which 80% is in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). NCDs will account for 80% of the global burden of disease by 2020 and account for 7 out of every 10 deaths in LMIC. NCD is no longer an emerging problem in developing countries, it’s assuming an alarming dimension, and taking on the proportion of an epidemic. Several literatures document the known risk factors for significant NCDs. The critical risk factors are tobacco usage, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, and detrimental usage of alcohol. To reverse the trend that leads to an increase in poor dietary patterns, sedentary lifestyle, tobacco use, and harmful alcohol use will need policies that transcend the health sector and policy change in different areas such as finance, urban planning, education, agriculture, and transportation.

Aquaculture, which is the breeding of fishes in artificial ponds, seems to be gaining popularity among urban and sub-urban dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Tenant aquaculture enables individuals irrespective of their profession to grow fishes locally in a little space. However, there are challenges facing aquaculture such as the availability of water, how to monitor and manage water quality, and more seriously, the problem of absence of dataset with which the farmer can use as a guide for fish breeding. Aquaponics is a system that combines conventional aquaculture with hydroponics (the method of growing plants in water i.e. soilless farming of crops). It uses these two technologies in a symbiotic combination in which the plant uses the waste from the fish as food while at the same time filtering the water for immediate re-use by the fish. This helps to solve the problem of frequent change of water. An Internet of Things (IoT) system consisting of an ESP-32 microcontroller which controls water quality sensors in aquaponics fish ponds was designed and developed for automatic data collection. The sensors include temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, ammonia and nitrate sensors. The IoT system reads water quality data and uploads the same to the cloud in real time. The dataset is visualized in the cloud and downloaded for the purposes of data analytics and decision-making. We present the dataset in this paper. The dataset will be very useful to the agriculture, aquaculture, data science and machine learning communities. The insights such dataset will provide when subjected to machine learning and data analytics will be very useful to fish farmers, informing them when to change the pond water, what stocking density to apply, provide knowledge about feed conversion ratios, and in predict the growth rate and patterns of their fishes., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:, (© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is among the deadliest human malignancies with a dismal prognosis. During PDAC progression, the immune response is affected as cancer cells evade detection and elimination. Recently, there have been advances in the treatment of PDAC using immunotherapy, although a lot more work is yet to be done. In this review, we discuss these advances, challenges and potentials. We focus on existing and potential immune targets for PDAC, drugs used to target them, and some clinical trials conducted so far with them. Finally, novel targets in the tumour microenvironment such as stromal cells and other potential future areas to explore including bacterial therapy and the use of neoantigens in immunotherapy are highlighted.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most lethal cancer types, and it is associated with a 5-year survival rate of <10% due to limited early detection methods and ineffective therapeutic options. Thus, an improved understanding of the mechanisms involved in the early stages of PDAC tumorigenesis is crucial in order to identify potential novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets. The most common signalling aberrations in PDAC occur in the Wnt/Notch signalling pathway, as well as within the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway and its associated ligands, EGF and transforming growth factor-β. In addition, the RAS family of oncogenes, which act downstream of EGFR, are found mutated in most pancreatic cancer samples. Plakoglobin, a component of the EGFR signalling pathway, serves an important role in normal cell adhesion; however, its role in PDAC is largely unknown. The present study used transcriptome sequencing and focussed proteome microarrays to identify dysregulated genes and proteins in PDAC. The presence of upregulated plakoglobin expression levels was identified as a distinguishing feature between the PDAC microenvironment and normal pancreatic tissue. Furthermore, plakoglobin was demonstrated to be associated with the differential upregulation of the PI3K/AKT and MAPK signalling pathways in the tumour microenvironment, which suggested that it may serve an important role in PDAC tumourigenesis., (Copyright © 2020, Spandidos Publications.)

The human retinoblastoma binding protein 6 (RBBP6) is implicated in esophageal, lung, hepatocellular and colon cancers. Furthermore, RBBP6 was identified as a strong marker for colon cancer prognosis and as a predisposing factor in familial myeloproliferative neoplasms. Functionally, the mammalian protein interacts with p53 and enhances the activity of Mdm2, the prototypical negative regulator of p53. However, since RBBP6 (known as PACT in mice) exists in multiple isoforms and pact-/- mice exhibit a more severe phenotype than mdm2-/- mutants, it must possess some Mdm2-independent functions. The function of the invertebrate homologue is poorly understood. This is complicated by the absence of the Mdm2 gene in both Drosophila and Caenorhabditis elegans. We have experimentally identified the promoter region of Snama, the Drosophila homologue, analyzed potential transcription factor binding sites and confirmed the existence of an additional isoform. Using band shift and co-immunoprecipitation assays combined with mass spectrometry, we found evidence that this gene may be regulated by, amongst others, DREF, which regulates hundreds of genes related to cell proliferation. The potential transcription factors for Snama fall into distinct functional groups, including anteroposterior embryonic patterning and nucleic acid metabolism. Significantly, previous work in mice shows that pact-/- induces an anteroposterior phenotype in embryos when rescued by simultaneous deletion of p53. Taken together, these observations indicate the significance of RBBP6 proteins in carcinogenesis and in developmental defects.