Monkeypox is re-emerging and spreading over the world, posing a serious threat to human life, especially in non-endemic countries, including Saudi Arabia. Due to the paucity of research on knowledge about monkeypox in Saudi Arabia, this study aimed to evaluate the general population’s knowledge of monkeypox in a sample of the country. A web-based cross-sectional survey was conducted from 25 May 2022 to 15 July 2022. Participants’ knowledge about monkeypox on a 23-item scale and socio-demographic characteristics were gathered in the survey. Pearson’s Chi-square test was used to compare knowledge level (categorized into high and low) and explanatory variables. Out of 480, only 48% of the respondents had high knowledge (mean score > 14). Participants’ age, marital status, residential region, living in the urban area, education level, employment status, being a healthcare worker, income, and smoking status were significantly associated with the level of knowledge about monkeypox (p < 0.01). Overall, social media (75.0%) was the most frequently reported source from where participants obtained monkeypox-related information followed by TV and radio (45.6%), family or friend (15.6%), and healthcare provider (13.8%). We found that overall knowledge of monkeypox infection was slightly poor among the Saudi population. These findings highlight the urgent need for public education on monkeypox to promote awareness and engage the public ahead of the outbreak.

Introduction: The recent multi-nation outbreaks of human monkeypox in non-endemic areas have created an emerging public health issue. Medical students who will become future healthcare providers are directly associated with community people and can easily sensitize the general population, so it is crucial to assess their degree of knowledge and attitudes regarding recently emerging infections or pathogens. However, studies on medical students' perception of the monkeypox virus are scarce in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the objective of this study was to assess the monkeypox virus-related knowledge and attitudes among medical students in the country.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from May to July 2022 among undergraduate medical students at King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia. A systematic random sampling technique was applied to select the study participants. A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather data on sociodemographic characteristics, knowledge and attitudes toward the monkeypox virus. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were performed.Results: A total of 314 medical students were recruited for this study. The findings from this study showed that the vast majority of medical students (72%) had poor knowledge about the monkeypox virus. Respondents' age, grade point average (GPA), fathers' education level, and training received about the monkeypox virus were significantly associated with the level of knowledge about the monkeypox virus (p < 0.05). Nearly half of the respondents (45.9%) agreed that the monkeypox virus could be transmitted to Saudi Arabia. Overall, this study showed that the awareness levels regarding the monkeypox virus were significantly higher among seniors as compared to junior students. Conclusion:The study found poor knowledge of the monkeypox virus among currently enrolled medical students in the country's highest-ranked medical school. This finding emphasizes the urgent need to increase their knowledge because controlling outbreaks requires significant cooperation from knowledgeable and skilled healthcare providers.

Lactoferrin (LF) is a major natural antimicrobial agent secreted in body fluids as a natural innate immunity protein. The action and structure of LF are closely related to its iron-binding capacity with structural reporting in open and closed conformations. This study looked at how lactoferrin structures change in camel (cLF), bovine (bLF), and human (hLF) lactoferrin closed forms after iron is removed from their binding sites. Initially, the sequence comparison between cLF and the LFs of marine mammals, bats, and domestic animals was the most intriguing conclusion. Camel LF is revealed to be more closely related to marine animals (~80.36% identity) and bats (~79.3% identity) than to terrestrial mammal species (~75.5% identity). Results indicated that cLF was more dynamic in nature than bLF and hLF by showing higher RMSD values. The cLF is known to be half lactoferrin half transferrin; in this study, we show that there are different MD behavior of both iron-binding sites. While LF contains two lobes (C- and N-lobes), the C-lobe showed high fluctuations as N-lobe was more stable in the absence of ferric ions. The C-lobe and N-lobe of cLF react differently at physiological pH, revealing distinct molecular interactions between these components. In addition, cLF showed higher system flexibility derived from its larger RMSD, RMSF, lower intermolecular hydrogen bonds, and higher solvent accessible surface area (SASA).

Decoding camel (Camelus genus) genome sequences (Jirimutu et al., 2012) will accelerate drug discovery studies against camel pathogens. One specific line of inquiry is investigating pyrimidine metabolic pathways, and finding unique differences in structure, function, sequence, or phylogeny associated with these pathways could contribute to identifying new drug targets. KEGG maps have been used (Ogata et al., 1998;Kanehisa et al., 2007;Kanehisa et al., 2016) to compare the enzymes involved in thymidine metabolism pathways in camels and T. evansi.In this work, comprehensive bioinformatic tools were used to investigate enzyme sequences in camels and T. evansi and compare their domains and motif content, searching for similar proteins and identifying their phylogenetic relationships. We plotted the pathway of thymidine metabolism in the two organisms, providing bioinformatics evidence of unique differences between camels and T. evansi that could be exploited for future drug discovery processes. MATERIALS AND METHODS Construction of the metabolic mapThe Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) website was used to retrieve the thymidine pathway maps.The map was accessed at the following link (https:// www.genome.jp/kegg-bin/show_pathway?map00240). The structure of nucleotides and the pathways were written by ChemDraw software (Figure 1). Retrieval of protein sequencesThe NCBI protein database was used to obtain the sequences of camel enzymes (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein), and the T. evansi protein sequences were retrieved from the Kinetoplastom genome project (http://tritrypdb.org/tritrypdb). The sequence files in FASTA format were stored and processed by multiple software programs, including the CLC main workbench, Geneious, and Genedoc. The accession numbers of the retrieved sequences are provided in Figures 2-5. Basic local alignment search tool (BLAST)A BLAST search was performed using the NCBI search engine (Madden, 2013). The BLAST tool was used to find orthologues with high similarity to the retrieved sequences by searching a database of non-redundant (nr) protein sequences using the default settings. The retrieved camel and T. evansi sequences were input into the protein BLAST server at ( h t t p s : / / b l a s t . n c b i . n l m . n i h . g o v / B l a s t . c g i ? P R O G R A M =blastp&PAGE_TYPE=BlastSearch&LINK_LOC=blasthome) using the FASTA sequences and searching the nr protein