Monitoring and evaluation of childhood stunting reduction program based on fish supplement product in North Sumatera, Indonesia.

The government of Serdang Bedagai Regency initiated a supplementation program to reduce the high prevalence of stunting in the area by delivering extra supplementation, which were nutritious biscuits from national government and fish-based supplement produced from local resources. A 6-month study from April 2022 to September 2022 was conducted to monitor and evaluate the government program that involved 219 under-5-year-old children with height-for-age Z-score (HAZ-score) below - 2. We observed the stunting prevalence reduction by 37.00%, where 81 children recovered from stunting (HAZ-score ≥ - 2). Furthermore, the mean HAZ-score and WHZ-score (Weight-for-Height Z-score) were monitored to significantly improve by 0.97 ± 1.45 (P-value = 1.74e-14) and 1.00 ± 2.18 (P-value = and 2.40e-8), subsequently. The most significant improvement in HAZ-score was monitored among children receiving fish-based supplements with 1.04 ± 1.44 improvement (P-value = 6.59e-17). Then, a significant WHZ-score improvement was reported from children consuming fish-based supplements and a combination of fish-based supplements with nutritious biscuits (P-value = 2.32e-8 and 5.48e-5) by 1.04 ± 2.29 and 0.83 ± 1.84, respectively. The results of the observation become evidence that the program could effectively reduce the prevalence of stunting in children below five years old, especially among children who received locally produced fish-based supplements.

Exploring an l-arabinose isomerase from cryophile bacteria Arthrobacter psychrolactophilus B7 for d-tagatose production.

A novel l-arabinose isomerase (L-AI) from Arthrobacter psychrolactophilus (Ap L-AI) was successfully cloned and characterized. The enzyme catalyzes the isomerization of d-galactose into a rare sugar d-tagatose. The recombinant Ap L-AI had an approximate molecular weight of about 258 kDa, suggesting it was an aggregate of five 58 kDa monomers and became the first record as a homo-pentamer L-AI. The catalytic efficiency (kcat/Km) and Km for d-galactose were 0.32 mM-1 min-1 and 51.43 mM, respectively, while for l-arabinose, were 0.64 mM-1 min-1 and 23.41 mM, respectively. It had the highest activity at pH 7.0-7.5 and 60 °C in the presence of 0.250 mM Mn2+. Ap L-AI was discovered to be an outstanding thermostable enzyme that only lost its half-life value at 60 °C for >1000 min. These findings suggest that l-arabinose isomerase from Arthrobacter psychrolactophilus is a promising candidate for d-tagatose mass-production due to its industrially competitive temperature.

Changing Colorectal Cancer Trends in Asians: Epidemiology and Risk Factors.

Once an infrequent disease in parts of Asia, the rate of colorectal cancer in recent decades appears to be steadily increasing. Colorectal cancer represents one of the most important causes of cancer mortality worldwide, including in many regions in Asia. Rapid changes in socioeconomic and lifestyle habits have been attributed to the notable increase in the incidence of colorectal cancers in many Asian countries. Through published data from the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC), we utilized available continuous data to determine which Asian nations had a rise in colorectal cancer rates. We found that East and South East Asian countries had a significant rise in colorectal cancer rates. Subsequently, we summarized here the known genetics and environmental risk factors for colorectal cancer among populations in this region as well as approaches to screening and early detection that have been considered across various countries in the region.

Cancer Risk Score Prediction Based on a Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Network.

OBJECTIVES: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are performed to study the associations between genetic variants with respect to certain phenotypic traits such as cancer. However, the method that is commonly used in GWAS assumes that certain traits are solely affected by a single mutation. We propose a network analysis method, in which we generate association networks of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that can differentiate case and control groups. We hypothesize that certain phenotypic traits are attributable to mutations in groups of associated SNPs. METHODS: We propose a method based on a network analysis framework to study SNP-SNP interactions related to cancer incidence. We employed logistic regression to measure the significance of all SNP pairs from GWAS for the incidence of colorectal cancer and computed a cancer risk score based on the generated SNP networks. RESULTS: We demonstrated our method in a dataset from a case-control study of colorectal cancer in the South Sulawesi population. From the GWAS results, 20,094 pairs of 200 SNPs were created. We obtained one cluster containing four pairs of five SNPs that passed the filtering threshold based on their p-values. A locus on chromosome 12 (12:54410007) was found to be strongly connected to the four variants on chromosome 1. A polygenic risk score was computed from the five SNPs, and a significant difference in colorectal cancer risk was obtained between the case and control groups. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate the applicability of our method to understand SNP-SNP interactions and compute risk scores for various types of cancer.

Intronic Variant of MUTYH Gene Exhibits A Strong Association with Early Onset of Breast Cancer Susceptibility in Indonesian Women Population.

OBJECTIVE: Several studies have recently indicated a huge shifting pattern toward early age onset cases in breast cancer (BC) patients. However, the studies exerted relatively limited to the Caucasian population. This preliminary study is aimed to investigate the genetic risk factors for young BC patients specifically in Indonesia population. METHODS: DNA samples were extracted from 79 BC patients aged younger than 40 years old and 90 healthy samples. These DNA samples were sequenced using Illumina NextSeq 500 platform and preprocessed to extract the single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) data. Firstly, multiple univariate logistic regressions were performed to test the association between each SNP and BC incidence in young patients. Furthermore, to analyze the polygenic effects derived from multiple SNPs, we employed a multivariate logistics regression. RESULTS: There were only 15 SNPs passed our 95% call rate threshold thus subsequently were used in the association test. One of these variants, rs3219493, emerged to be significantly associated with early-onset BC (p-value = 0.025, OR = 3.750, 95% CI = 1.178-11.938). This result is consistent with the multivariate logistic regression model, where the pertinent variant was found statistically significant (p-value = 0.008, OR = 8.398, 95% CI = 1.720-40.920). This variant was identified as an intronic variant within MUTYH gene which has been reported in several published studies to exhibit an association with the incidence of breast cancer in China, Italy and Sephardi Jews population. However, there is no evident this gene impacting the risk of developing early onset of BC in Indonesia population. CONCLUSION: Despite our limitation in terms of sample size analyzed in this preliminary study, our finding on significant association of intronic MUTHY with the early onset of BC in Indonesia led to a broadened insight of population-based unique aspect to being taken into an in-depth account for and advancement of chemotherapy.

Comparative study of predicted miRNA between Indonesia and China (Wuhan) SARS-CoV-2: a bioinformatics analysis.

BACKGROUND: Several reports on the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 mutations and variations in Indonesia COVID-19 cases led to genomic dysregulation with the first pandemic cases in Wuhan, China. MicroRNA (miRNA) plays an important role in this genetic regulation and contributes to the enhancement of viral RNA binding through the host mRNA. OBJECTIVE: This research is aimed to detect miRNA targets of SARS-CoV-2 and examines their role in Indonesia cases against Wuhan cases. METHODS: SARS-CoV-2 sequences were obtained from GISAID ( https://www.gisaid.org/ ), NCBI ( https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ), and National Genomics Data Center ( https://bigd.big.ac.cn/gwh/ ) databases. MiRDB ( https://github.com/gbnegrini/mirdb-custom-target-search ) was used to annotate and predict target human mature miRNAs. For statistical analysis, we utilized a series chi-square test to obtain significant miRNA. DIANA-miRPath v3.0 ( http://www.microrna.gr/miRPathv3 ) analyzed the Gene Ontology of mature miRNAs. RESULT: The statistical results detected five significant miRNAs. Two miRNAs: hsa-miR-4778-5p and hsa-miR-4531 were consistently found in the majority of Wuhan samples, while they were only found in less than half of the Indonesia samples. The other three miRNA, hsa-miR-6844, hsa-miR-627-5p, and hsa-miR-3674, were discovered in most samples in both groups but with a significant difference ratio. Among these five significant miRNA targets, hsa-miR-6844 is the only miRNA that has an association with the ORF1ab gene of SARS-CoV-2. CONCLUSION: The Gene Ontology analysis of five significant miRNA targets indicates a significant role in inflammation and the immune system. The specific detection of host miRNAs in this study shows that there are differences in the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 between Indonesia and Wuhan.