Olive Oil Polyphenols in Neurodegenerative Pathologies.

Neurodegenerative diseases lead to the death of nerve cells in the brain or the spinal cord. A wide range of diseases are included within the group of neurodegenerative disorders, with the most common ones being dementia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's diseases. Millions of older people are suffering from such pathologies. The global increase of life expectancy unavoidably leads to a consequent increase in the number of people who will be at some degree affected by neurodegenerative-related diseases. At this moment, there is no effective therapy or treatment that can reverse the loss of neurons. A growing number of studies highlight the value of the consumption of medical foods, and in particular olive oil, as one of the most important components of the Mediterranean diet. A diet based on extra virgin olive oil seems to contribute toward the lowering of risk of age-related pathologies due to high phenol concentration. The link of a polyphenol found in extra virgin olive oil, namely, tyrosol, with the protein tyrosinase, associated to Parkinson's disease is underlined as a paradigm of affiliation between polyphenols and neurodegenerative disorders.

Drugena: A Fully Automated Immunoinformatics Platform for the Design of Antibody-Drug Conjugates Against Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Antibodies are proteins that are the first line of defense in the adaptive immune response of vertebrates. Thereby, they are involved in a multitude of biochemical mechanisms and clinical manifestations with significant medical interest, such as autoimmunity, the regulation of infection, and cancer. An emerging field in antibody science that is of huge medicinal interest is the development of novel antibody-interacting drugs. Such entities are the antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), which are a new type of targeted therapy, which consist of an antibody linked to a payload drug. Overall, the underlying principle of ADCs is the discerning delivery of a drug to a target, hoping to increase the potency of the original drug. Drugena suite is a pioneering platform that employs state-of-the-art computational biology methods in the fight against neurodegenerative diseases using ADCs. Drugena encompasses an up-to-date structural database of specialized antibodies for neurological disorders and the NCI database with over 96 million entities for the in silico development of ADCs. The pipeline of the Drugena suite has been divided into several steps and modules that are closely related with a synergistic fashion under a user-friendly graphical user interface.

A genomic data mining pipeline for 15 species of the genus Olea.

In the big data era, conventional bioinformatics seems to fail in managing the full extent of the available genomic information. The current study is focused on olive tree species and the collection and analysis of genetic and genomic data, which are fragmented in various depositories. Extra virgin olive oil is classified as a medical food, due to nutraceutical benefits and its protective properties against cancer, cardiovascular diseases, age-related diseases, neurodegenerative disorders, and many other diseases. Extensive studies have reported the benefits of olive oil on human health. However, available data at the nucleotide sequence level are highly unstructured. Towards this aim, we describe an in-silico approach that combines methods from data mining and machine learning pipelines to ontology classification and semantic annotation. Fusing and analysing all available olive tree data is a step of uttermost importance in classifying and characterising the various cultivars, towards a comprehensive approach under the context of food safety and public health.