Published in Biology Direct
Human aromatase is a member of the cytochrome P450 superfamily, involved in steroid hormones biosynthesis. In particular, it converts androgen into estrogens being therefore responsible for the correct sex steroids balance. Due to its capacity in producing estrogens it has also been considered as a promising target for breast cancer therapy. Two si...
Published in Biology Direct
Cancer is a poligenetic disease with each cancer type having a different mutation profile. Genomic data can be utilized to detect these profiles and to diagnose and differentiate cancer types. Variant calling provide mutation information. Gene expression data reveal the altered cell behaviour. The combination of the mutation and expression informat...
Published in Biology Direct
BackgroundDrug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major safety concern characterized by a complex and diverse pathogenesis. In order to identify DILI early in drug development, a better understanding of the injury and models with better predictivity are urgently needed. One approach in this regard are in silico models which aim at predicting the risk...
Published in Biology Direct
BackgroundDrug-induced liver injury (DILI) is an adverse reaction caused by the intake of drugs of common use that produces liver damage. The impact of DILI is estimated to affect around 20 in 100,000 inhabitants worldwide each year. Despite being one of the main causes of liver failure, the pathophysiology and mechanisms of DILI are poorly underst...
Published in Biology Direct
BackgroundThe human proteins TMTC1, TMTC2, TMTC3 and TMTC4 have been experimentally shown to be components of a new O-mannosylation pathway. Their own mannosyl-transferase activity has been suspected but their actual enzymatic potential has not been demonstrated yet. So far, sequence analysis of TMTCs has been compromised by evolutionary sequence d...
Published in Biology Direct
The concept of developmental constraints has been central to understand the role of development in morphological evolution. Developmental constraints are classically defined as biases imposed by development on the distribution of morphological variation. This opinion article argues that the concepts of developmental constraints and developmental bi...
Published in Biology Direct
MotivationDrug-induced liver injury (DILI) is one of the primary problems in drug development. Early prediction of DILI can bring a significant reduction in the cost of clinical trials. In this work we examined whether occurrence of DILI can be predicted using gene expression profile in cancer cell lines and chemical properties of drugs.MethodsWe u...
Published in Biology Direct
BackgroundComposition of microbial communities can be location-specific, and the different abundance of taxon within location could help us to unravel city-specific signature and predict the sample origin locations accurately. In this study, the whole genome shotgun (WGS) metagenomics data from samples across 16 cities around the world and samples ...
Published in Biology Direct
Knowing the “point of view” of the immune system is essential to understand the characteristic of a pandemic, such as that generated by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV)-2, responsible for the Coronavirus Disease (COVID)-19. In this review, we will discuss the general host/pathogen interactions dictating protective immune...
Published in Biology Direct
BackgroundThe advent of metagenomic sequencing provides microbial abundance patterns that can be leveraged for sample origin prediction. Supervised machine learning classification approaches have been reported to predict sample origin accurately when the origin has been previously sampled. Using metagenomic datasets provided by the 2019 CAMDA chall...
