TiO2 particles are commonly used as dietary supplements and may contain up to 36% of nano-sized particles (TiO2-NPs). Still impact and translocation of NPs through the gut epithelium is poorly documented.

A compendium of SRM assays for cancer-associated proteins provides a resource for accelerating and planning biomarker verification studies.

Microbial biotransformations have a major impact on contamination by toxic elements, which threatens public health in developing and industrial countries. Finding a means of preserving natural environments—including ground and surface waters—from arsenic constitutes a major challenge facing modern society. Although this metalloid is ubiquitous on Earth, thus far no bacterium thriving in arsenic-contaminated environments has been fully characterized. In-depth exploration of the genome of the β-proteobacterium Herminiimonas arsenicoxydans with regard to physiology, genetics, and proteomics, revealed that it possesses heretofore unsuspected mechanisms for coping with arsenic. Aside from multiple biochemical processes such as arsenic oxidation, reduction, and efflux, H. arsenicoxydans also exhibits positive chemotaxis and motility towards arsenic and metalloid scavenging by exopolysaccharides. These observations demonstrate the existence of a novel strategy to efficiently colonize arsenic-rich environments, which extends beyond oxidoreduction reactions. Such a microbial mechanism of detoxification, which is possibly exploitable for bioremediation applications of contaminated sites, may have played a crucial role in the occupation of ancient ecological niches on earth. Microorganisms play a crucial role in nutrient biogeochemical cycles. Arsenic is found throughout the environment from both natural and anthropogenic sources. Its inorganic forms are highly toxic and impair the physiology of most higher organisms. Arsenic contamination of groundwater supplies is giving rise to increasingly severe human health problems in both developing and industrial countries. In the present work, we investigated the metabolism of this metalloid in Herminiimonas arsenicoxydans, a representative organism of a novel bacterial genus widespread in aquatic environments. Examination of the genome sequence and experimental evidence revealed that it is remarkably capable of coping with arsenic. Our observations support the existence of multiple strategies allowing arsenic-metabolizing microbes to efficiently colonize toxic environments. In particular, arsenic oxidation and scavenging may have played a crucial role in the development of early stages of life on Earth. Such mechanisms may one day be exploited as part of a potential bioremediation strategy in toxic environments.

The drivers of critical coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remain unknown. Given major confounding factors such as age and comorbidities, true mediators of this condition have remained elusive. We used a multi-omics analysis combined with artificial intelligence in a young patient cohort where major comorbidities were excluded at the onset. The cohort included 47 “critical” (in the intensive care unit under mechanical ventilation) and 25 “non-critical” (in a non-critical care ward) patients with COVID-19 and 22 healthy individuals. The analyses included whole-genome sequencing, whole-blood RNA sequencing, plasma and blood mononuclear cell proteomics, cytokine profiling, and high-throughput immunophenotyping. An ensemble of machine learning, deep learning, quantum annealing, and structural causal modeling were used. Patients with critical COVID-19 were characterized by exacerbated inflammation, perturbed lymphoid and myeloid compartments, increased coagulation, and viral cell biology. Among differentially expressed genes, we observed up-regulation of the metalloproteaseADAM9. This gene signature was validated in a second independent cohort of 81 critical and 73 recovered patients with COVID-19 and was further confirmed at the transcriptional and protein level and by proteolytic activity. Ex vivo ADAM9 inhibition decreased severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) uptake and replication in human lung epithelial cells. In conclusion, within a young, otherwise healthy, cohort of individuals with COVID-19, we provide the landscape of biological perturbations in vivo where a unique gene signature differentiated critical from non-critical patients. We further identifiedADAM9as a driver of disease severity and a candidate therapeutic target.