Pathogen-sugar interactions revealed by universal saturation transfer analysis.

Many pathogens exploit host cell-surface glycans. However, precise analyses of glycan ligands binding with heavily modified pathogen proteins can be confounded by overlapping sugar signals and/or compounded with known experimental constraints. Universal saturation transfer analysis (uSTA) builds on existing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to provide an automated workflow for quantitating protein-ligand interactions. uSTA reveals that early-pandemic, B-origin-lineage severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike trimer binds sialoside sugars in an "end-on" manner. uSTA-guided modeling and a high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure implicate the spike N-terminal domain (NTD) and confirm end-on binding. This finding rationalizes the effect of NTD mutations that abolish sugar binding in SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. Together with genetic variance analyses in early pandemic patient cohorts, this binding implicates a sialylated polylactosamine motif found on tetraantennary N-linked glycoproteins deep in the human lung as potentially relevant to virulence and/or zoonosis.

Which are the best practices for MSc programmes in sustainable agriculture?

Programmes of education for sustainable development are important to reformulate and revise educational programmes in Sustainable Agriculture. Higher education institutes emerge as learning places to integrate sustainable development into the educational system, through graduation and MSc programmes, to provide a more effective response to the higher environmental and agriculture concerns. The aim of this study was to identify the best practices to be included in a MSc programme of education for sustainable development in agriculture based on a questionnaire prepared and distributed to agrarian sciences experts. The questionnaires were developed in order to define the fundamental competences/expertise, to identify the best practices and the methods of training/learning that should be taken in consideration in a MSc programme in Sustainable Agriculture. The results showed that the fundamental expertise of MSc programmes should be based on knowledge transfer of agricultural measures to mitigate the impact of climate change on agricultural systems. MSc programmes in Sustainable Agriculture should include interdisciplinary courses related to sustainability and agro-environmental technologies, such as Precision Agriculture, and incorporate adaptive and mitigate practices as those used in the Circular Economy strategy. Traditional face-to-face training methods are considered the most important forms of training/learning in a MSc programme in Sustainable Agriculture. However, due to COVID-19 pandemic, online learning methods, traditionally considered not suitable for MSc programme in Sustainable Agriculture, became important by providing online education. Information and communication technology and technological tools showed to be important skills to effectively implement online learning and to improve the efficient access and use of up-to-date information of the agricultural sector.

Advancing COVID-19 differentiation with a robust preprocessing and integration of multi-institutional open-repository computer tomography datasets for deep learning analysis.

The coronavirus pandemic and its unprecedented consequences globally has spurred the interest of the artificial intelligence research community. A plethora of published studies have investigated the role of imaging such as chest X-rays and computer tomography in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) automated diagnosis. Οpen repositories of medical imaging data can play a significant role by promoting cooperation among institutes in a world-wide scale. However, they may induce limitations related to variable data quality and intrinsic differences due to the wide variety of scanner vendors and imaging parameters. In this study, a state-of-the-art custom U-Net model is presented with a dice similarity coefficient performance of 99.6% along with a transfer learning VGG-19 based model for COVID-19 versus pneumonia differentiation exhibiting an area under curve of 96.1%. The above was significantly improved over the baseline model trained with no segmentation in selected tomographic slices of the same dataset. The presented study highlights the importance of a robust preprocessing protocol for image analysis within a heterogeneous imaging dataset and assesses the potential diagnostic value of the presented COVID-19 model by comparing its performance to the state of the art.

Interpretable artificial intelligence framework for COVID-19 screening on chest X-rays.

COVID-19 has led to an unprecedented healthcare crisis with millions of infected people across the globe often pushing infrastructures, healthcare workers and entire economies beyond their limits. The scarcity of testing kits, even in developed countries, has led to extensive research efforts towards alternative solutions with high sensitivity. Chest radiological imaging paired with artificial intelligence (AI) can offer significant advantages in diagnosis of novel coronavirus infected patients. To this end, transfer learning techniques are used for overcoming the limitations emanating from the lack of relevant big datasets, enabling specialized models to converge on limited data, as in the case of X-rays of COVID-19 patients. In this study, we present an interpretable AI framework assessed by expert radiologists on the basis on how well the attention maps focus on the diagnostically-relevant image regions. The proposed transfer learning methodology achieves an overall area under the curve of 1 for a binary classification problem across a 5-fold training/testing dataset.

A dissection of SARS­CoV2 with clinical implications (Review).

We are being confronted with the most consequential pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918­1920 to the extent that never before have 4 billion people quarantined simultaneously; to address this global challenge we bring to the forefront the options for medical treatment and summarize SARS­CoV2 structure and functions, immune responses and known treatments. Based on literature and our own experience we propose new interventions, including the use of amiodarone, simvastatin, pioglitazone and curcumin. In mild infections (sore throat, cough) we advocate prompt local treatment for the naso­pharynx (inhalations; aerosols; nebulizers); for moderate to severe infections we propose a tried­and­true treatment: the combination of arginine and ascorbate, administered orally or intravenously. The material is organized in three sections: i) Clinical aspects of COVID­19; acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS); known treatments; ii) Structure and functions of SARS­CoV2 and proposed antiviral drugs; iii) The combination of arginine­ascorbate.