Human amylase is important to digestion and has broad applications for therapeutic use in patients with pancreatic insufficiency. The authors present a method to increase amylase production in E. coli by adding the amino acids L-glutamate and L-glutamine.

While increased access to Wi-Fi has been a great advancement, we have a limited understanding if there are any health effects on animals. In this study, Anand and Anand exposed fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to different concentrations of Wi-Fi electromagnetic fields, and observed effects on their reproduction and survivability.

Some spices have antimicrobial or antibacterial properties that people have already tested. Turmeric has a wide variety of uses and has even been implemented in alternative medicine as a treatment for cancer, inflammation, osteoarthritis, and other diseases. We tested the antimicrobial effects of turmeric under two different pHs to characterize this effect in vitro. Decreasing the pH of a solution of turmeric may increase antibacterial properties.

In this study, the authors address the concerns of heavy metal contamination in industrial and feedlot water waste. They test whether added probiotics are capable of taking up heavy metals in water to attenuate pollution.

Enzyme chemotaxis is a thermodynamic phenomenon in which enzymes move along a substrate concentration gradient towards regions with higher substrate concentrations and can be used to steer nanovehicles towards targets along natural substrate concentrations. In patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a gradient of tau protein forms in the bloodstream. Tau protein is a substrate of the enzyme CDK5, which catalyzes the phosphorylation of tau protein and can travel using chemotaxis along tau protein gradients to increasing concentrations of tau and amyloid-beta proteins. The authors hypothesized that CDK5 would be able to overcome these barriers of Brownian motion and developed a quantitative model using Michaelis-Menten kinetics to define the necessary parameters to confirm and characterize CDK5’s chemotactic behavior to establish its utility in drug delivery and other applications.

Antibiotics are one of the most common treatments for bacterial infections, but the emergence of antibiotic resistance is a major threat to the control of infectious diseases. Many factors contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance. One is bacterial conjugation from Gram-positive to Gram-negative bacteria where there is a transfer of resistance genes from Gram-positive to Gram-negative bacteria that could increase antibiotic resistance in the latter. In light of these observations, we decided to test whether Gram-negative bacteria that came into contact with Gram-positive bacteria had a higher resistance to the antimicrobial properties of spices than Gram-negative bacteria that did not come into contact with Gram-positive bacteria.

Here, seeking to better understand the effects of gadolinium-based contrast agents, dyes typically used for MRI scans, the authors evaluated the activity of catalase found in beef liver both with and without gadodiamide when exposed to hydrogen peroxide. They found that gadioamide did not significantly inhibit catalase's activity, attributing this lack of effects to the chelating agent found in gadodiamide.

A primary cause of diabetes is insulin resistance, which is caused by disruption of insulin signal transduction. The objective of this study was to maximize insulin sensitivity by creating a more effective, early intervention-based treatment to avert severe T2D. This treatment combined metformin, “the insulin sensitizer”, and medicinal plants, curcumin, fenugreek, and nettle.

The facial integument, or external skin tissues, were assessed on set of dinosaurs from the Allosauroidea clade to test whether dermal patterns served specific functions.

In this study, the authors developed a model named DNA Sequence Embedding Network (DNA-SEnet) to classify DNA-asthma associations using their genomic patterns.