During the past decade, with the significant progress of computational power as well as ever-rising data availability, deep learning techniques became increasingly popular due to their excellent performance on computer vision problems. The size of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) has increased more than 15-fold since 1999, which enabled the expansion of models that aim at predicting enzymatic function via their amino acid composition. Amino acid sequence, however, is less conserved in nature than protein structure and therefore considered a less reliable predictor of protein function. This paper presents EnzyNet, a novel 3D convolutional neural networks classifier that predicts the Enzyme Commission number of enzymes based only on their voxel-based spatial structure. The spatial distribution of biochemical properties was also examined as complementary information. The two-layer architecture was investigated on a large dataset of 63,558 enzymes from the PDB and achieved an accuracy of 78.4% by exploiting only the binary representation of the protein shape. Code and datasets are available athttps://github.com/shervinea/enzynet.

Social appearance anxiety is a type of social anxiety that is associated with body image perception and exacerbated by the use of social media, leading to feelings of loneliness. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the relations between social appearance anxiety, use of social media, and feelings of loneliness in Greek adolescents and young adults. The sample of the research consisted of 632 participants, 439 women (69.5%) and 193 men (30.5%), aged 18–35 years. The Social Appearance Anxiety Scale (SAAS), the Social Media Disorder Scale (SMDS), and the UCLA Loneliness Scale were the instruments used. Data collection was performed online, via Google forms. Multiple regression analyses were performed and demonstrated a significant positive correlation between the Social Appearance Anxiety Scale and the UCLA Loneliness Scale scores. The feeling of loneliness was predicted by the social appearance anxiety score (p < 0.0001). On the other hand, there was a significant negative correlation between the Social Appearance Anxiety Scale and the Social Media Disorder Scale scores (p = 0.002), suggesting that social media use may exacerbate appearance anxiety and, hence, loneliness. The findings suggest that there may be a complex, vicious reverberatory cycle between appearance anxiety, use of social media, and feelings of loneliness in some young people.

Plant growth promoting bacteria (PGPB) are used as biostimulants to improve the growth and yield as well as the quality of crops. In the present study, nine strains of PGPB and one solid mix consisting of two of them were evaluated on the cultivation of industrial tomato under specific soil and climatic conditions. The results showed that Bacillus licheniformis treatment increased dry weight of the tomato plants by 39%, and the photosynthetic rate was increased by Priestia megaterium 9.9%. The application of Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, Priestia megaterium, and Bacillus licheniformis increased mean fruit weight per plant 26.78–30.70% compared to that of control. Yield per plant was increased 51.94% with the use of Bacillus licheniformis compared to that of control. The quality of the fruits in nearly every bacteria strain was improved. Bacillus pumilus and the mix of Priestia megaterium and Azotobacter chroococcum (1:1) increased the most total soluble solids in the tomato fruits (4.70° Brix), and Priestia megaterium increased content in lycopene and total carotenoids by 52.8% and 25%, respectively; Bacillus pseudomycoides increased Pectin methylesterase (PME) activity (24.94 units/mL), and Bacillusmojavensis, along with the mix of Priestia megaterium and Azotobacter chroococcum, increased Poligalacturonase (PG) activity the most (30.09 and 32.53 units/mL, respectively). Most of the bacteria strains presented an increased antioxidant activity significantly better that that of the control up to 31.25%. The results of this study confirmed that the use of PGPB as biostimulants can improve the yield and the quality of industrial tomato.

During the last decades, there is a vast data explosion in bioinformatics. Big data centres are trying to face this data crisis, reaching high storage capacity levels. Although several scientific giants examine how to handle the enormous pile of information in their cupboards, the problem remains unsolved. On a daily basis, there is a massive quantity of permanent loss of extensive information due to infrastructure and storage space problems. The motivation for sequencing has fallen behind. Sometimes, the time that is spent to solve storage space problems is longer than the one dedicated to collect and analyse data. To bring sequencing to the foreground, scientists have to slide over such obstacles and find alternative ways to approach the issue of data volume. Scientific community experiences the data crisis era, where, out of the box solutions may ease the typical research workflow, until technological development meets the needs of Bioinformatics.

The rate of Flaviviridae family virus infections worldwide has increased dramatically in the last few years. In addition, infections caused by arthropod vector viruses including Hepatitis C, West Nile, Dengue fever, Yellow fever and Japanese encephalitis are emerging throughout the world. Based on a recent taxon update, the Flaviviridae family comprises four main genera; Flavivirus, Hepacivirus, Pestivirus and a recent genus Pegivirus. Although the new scientific classification plays a key role in providing useful information about the relationships between viruses, many new documented viruses remain unclassified. Furthermore, based on the different results of several studies the classification is unclear. In an effort to provide more insights into the classification of viruses, a holistic evolutionary study of the two viral enzymes NS3 helicase and NS5 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) has been conducted in this study. These two viral enzymes are very crucial for the inhibition of viruses due to the fact that they are involved in the survival, proliferation and transmission of viruses. The main goal of this study is the presentation of two novel updated phylogenetic trees of the enzymes NS3 helicase and NS5 RdRp as a reliable phylogeny “map” to correlate the information of the closely related viruses and identify new possible targets for the Flaviviridae family virus inhibition. Despite the earliest trials for drugs against Flaviviridae related viruses, no antiviral drug vaccine has been available to date. Therefore there is an urgent need for research towards the development of efficient antiviral agents.