Increasing evidence is demonstrating that a patient’s unique genetic profile can be used to detect the disease’s onset, prevent its progression, and optimize its treatment. This led to the increased global efforts to implement personalized medicine (PM) and pharmacogenomics (PG) in clinical practice. Here we investigated the perceptions of students from different universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) towards PG/PM as well as related ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI). This descriptive, cross-sectional study is based on the survey of 559 students from the Faculties of Medicine, Pharmacy, Health Studies, Genetics, and Bioengineering and other study programs. Our results showed that 50% of students heard about personal genome testing companies and 69% consider having a genetic test done. A majority of students (57%) agreed that PM represents a promising healthcare model, and 40% of students agreed that their study program is well designed for understanding PG/PM. This latter opinion seems to be particularly influenced by the field of study (7.23, CI 1.99–26.2, p = 0.003). Students with this opinion are also more willing to continue their postgraduate education in the PM (OR = 4.68, CI 2.59–8.47, p < 0.001). Furthermore, 45% of students are aware of different ethical aspects of genetic testing, with most of them (46%) being concerned about the patient’s privacy. Our results indicate a positive attitude of biomedical students in Bosnia and Herzegovina towards genetic testing and personalized medicine. Importantly, our results emphasize the key importance of pharmacogenomic education for more efficient translation of precision medicine into clinical practice.

Circadian rhythms pervade nearly all aspects of plant growth, physiology, and development. Generation of the rhythms relies on an endogenous timing system or circadian clock that generates 24-h oscillations in multiple rhythmic outputs. At its bases, the plant circadian function relies on dynamic interactive networks of clock components that regulate each other to generate rhythms at specific phases during the day and night. From the initial discovery more than 13 years ago of a parallelism between the oscillations in chromatin status and the transcriptional rhythms of an Arabidopsis clock gene, a number of studies have later expanded considerably our view on the circadian epigenome and transcriptome landscapes. Here, we describe the most recent identification of chromatin-related factors that are able to directly interact with Arabidopsis clock proteins to shape the transcriptional waveforms of circadian gene expression and clock outputs. We discuss how changes in chromatin marks associate with transcript initiation, elongation, and the rhythms of nascent RNAs, and speculate on future interesting research directions in the field.

Objectives: Due to the complexity of DNA-Repair Mechanisms in Plants, this work will give more insights to better understanding the dark DNA-repair mechanism through the interactome analysis of DDBs proteins in plants. Method: Bioinformatics tools had been used in this work to analyses DNA Damage-Binding proteins; MSA, Phylogenetic tree construction, 3-D structure prediction, Domain analysis, subcellular localization prediction, Interactome analysis and docking sites. Result: DDB1a and DDB1b are closely related, while DDB2 protein is on the other branch, which further confirms our previous results about the homology present between proteins DDB1a and DDB1b. We found two domains of AtDDB1a and AtDDB1b. These are MMS1_N and CPSF_A; 464 and 314 amino acids long, respectively. AtDDB2 was identified with ten domains – two zinc fingers and five WD40 domains with three simple regions interspersed between them. DDB1a and DDB1b interact with much more proteins when compared to DDB2. In fact, DDB2 shows only 3 high confidence interactions, two of which are with DDB1a and DDB1b. Interesting result is that the only additional protein DDB2 interacts with is CUL4, which is a protein involved in ubiquitination. Conclusion: This study shed new light to that puzzle through development and analysis of the interactome of DDB proteins. Most importantly, the interaction of E3-ligase-forming complex (AtDDB1 – CUL4 – CSA) was confirmed. This is extremely important since E3-ligase is a key player in DNA repair mechanism. In addition, beside the legendary role of DDBs proteins in DNA-repair mechanism, they play other important roles in negative regulation of abscisic acid ABA and ABA-mediated developmental responses, including inhibition of seed germination, seedling establishment, and root growth.

Aida Maric; Beyond the genetics of flowering: Integration of ethylene signaling and histone methylation controls flowering time, Plant Physiology, , kiad230, ht

Aida Maric; Memories that last: Epigenetic regulation of cold stress response prepares plants for subsequent stress events, Plant Physiology, , kiae579, ht