In turn, these principles are relevant for understanding the composition, functionality, and resilience of desert ecosystems, as well as predicting responses to the growing problem of desertification. Copyright © 2020 Leung et al.As of today (7 April 2020), more than 81,000 people around the world have died from the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic. There is no approved drug or vaccine for COVID-19, although more than 10 clinical trials have been launched to test potential drugs. In an urgent response to this pandemic, I developed a bioinformatics pipeline to identify compounds and drug candidates to potentially treat COVID-19. This pipeline is based on publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data and the drug perturbation database "Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures" (LINCS). I developed a ranking score system that prioritizes these drugs or small molecules. The four drugs with the highest total score are didanosine, benzyl-quinazolin-4-yl-amine, camptothecin, and RO-90-7501. In conclusion, I have demonstrated the utility of bioinformatics for identifying drugs than can be repurposed for potentially treating COVID-19 patients. Copyright © 2020 Alakwaa.Microbial heterotopic metabolism in the ocean is fueled by a supply of essential nutrients acquired via exoenzymes catalyzing depolymerization of high-molecular-weight compounds. Although the rates of activity for a variety of exoenzymes across various marine environments are well established, the factors regulating the production of these exoenzymes, and to some extent their correlation with microbial community composition, are less known. This study focuses on addressing these challenges using a mesocosm experiment that compared a natural seawater microbial community (control) and exposed (to oil) treatment. Exoenzyme activities for β-glucosidase, leucine aminopeptidase (LAP), and lipase were significantly correlated with dissolved nutrient concentrations. We measured correlations between carbon- and nitrogen-acquiring enzymes (β-glucosidase/lipase versus LAP) and found that the correlation of carbon-acquiring enzymes varies with the chemical nature of the available primary carbon source. Notably, a strong re strongly correlated with inorganic nutrient levels, while those associated with carbon acquisition depended on the type of organic carbon available. We also show a linear relationship between carbon- and nitrogen-acquiring exoenzymes and a strong correlation between microbial biomass and exoenzymes, highlighting their significance to microbial productivity. Last, we show that changes in microbial community composition are not strongly associated with changes in exoenzyme activity profiles, a finding which reveals a redundancy of exoenzyme activity functions among microbial community. These findings advance our understanding of previously unknown factors associated with exoenzyme production in the marine environment. Copyright © 2020 Kamalanathan et al.We recently found that an invasion of CD8+ cytotoxic T cells into tissue cysts of Toxoplasma gondii initiates an elimination of the cysts in association with an accumulation of microglia and macrophages. In the present study, we compared mRNA levels for 734 immune-related genes in the brains of infected SCID mice that received perforin-sufficient or -deficient CD8+ immune T cells at 3 weeks after infection. At 7 days after the T cell transfer, mRNA levels for only six genes were identified to be greater in the recipients of the perforin-sufficient T cells than in the recipients of the perforin-deficient T cells. These six molecules included two T cell costimulatory molecules, inducible T cell costimulator receptor (ICOS) and its ligand (ICOSL); two chemokine receptors, C-X-C motif chemokine receptor 3 (CXCR3) and CXCR6; and two molecules related to an activation of microglia and macrophages, interleukin 18 receptor 1 (IL-18R1) and chitinase-like 3 (Chil3). Consistently, a marked reduction of cyst numbers and nduce their elimination, which is accompanied with an accumulation of phagocytic cells to the T cell-attacked target.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/AdipoRon.html  This is the first evidence of the ability of the T cells to invade into a large target for its elimination. However, the mechanisms involved in anticyst immunity remain unclear. Immune profiling analyses of 734 immune-related genes in the present study provided a valuable foundation to initiate elucidating detailed molecular mechanisms of the novel effector function of the immune system operated by perforin-mediated invasion of CD8+ T cells into large targets for their elimination. Copyright © 2020 Lutshumba et al.As research focusing on the colorectal cancer fecal microbiome using shotgun sequencing continues, increasing evidence has supported correlations between colorectal carcinomas (CRCs) and fecal microbiome dysbiosis. However, large-scale on-site and off-site (surrounding adjacent) tissue microbiome characterization of CRC was underrepresented. Here, considering each taxon as a feature, we demonstrate a machine learning-based method to investigate tissue microbial differences among CRC, colorectal adenoma (CRA), and healthy control groups using 16S rRNA data sets retrieved from 15 studies. A total of 2,099 samples were included and analyzed in case-control comparisons. Multiple methods, including differential abundance analysis, random forest classification, cooccurrence network analysis, and Dirichlet multinomial mixture analysis, were conducted to investigate the microbial signatures. We showed that the dysbiosis of the off-site tissue of colonic cancer was distinctive and predictive. The AUCs (areas under theuniformly on a large scale. Here, we characterize the microbiome signatures and dysbiosis of various colonic cancer sample groups. We found a high correlation between colorectal carcinoma adjacent tissue microbiomes and their on-site counterparts. We also discovered that the microbiome dysbiosis in adjacent tissues could discriminate colorectal carcinomas from healthy controls effectively. These results extend our knowledge on the microbial profile of colorectal cancer tissues and highlight microbiota dysbiosis in the surrounding tissues. They also suggest that microbial feature variations of cancerous lesion-adjacent tissues might help to reveal the microbial etiology of colonic cancer and could ultimately be applied for diagnostic and screening purposes. Copyright © 2020 Mo et al.