Our review of the experimental evidence supports a protective effect of topical sunscreens in preventing UVR-induced DNA damage in human skin cells in vivo.

In protein fold recognition, a protein is classified into one of its folds. The recognition of a protein fold can be done by employing feature extraction methods to extract relevant information from protein sequences and then by using a classifier to accurately recognize novel protein sequences. In the past, several feature extraction methods have been developed but with limited recognition accuracy only. Protein sequences of varying lengths share the same fold and therefore they are very similar (in a fold) if aligned properly. To this, we develop an amino acid alignment method to extract important features from protein sequences by computing dissimilarity distances between proteins. This is done by measuring distance between two respective position specific scoring matrices of protein sequences which is used in a support vector machine framework. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on several benchmark datasets. The method shows significant improvement in the fold recognition performance which is in the range of 4.3-7.6% compared to several other existing feature extraction methods.

Summary Background Ultraviolet radiation causes cutaneous melanoma. Sunscreen prevents sunburn and protects skin cells against mutations. High‐quality epidemiological studies suggest regular sunscreen use prevents melanoma. Objectives To calculate the potential impact fraction (PIF) for melanoma in the U.S.A. and Australia assuming a range of different intervention scenarios intended to increase sunscreen use. Methods We calculated the PIF, the proportional difference between the observed number of melanomas arising under prevailing levels of sunscreen use compared with the number expected under counterfactual scenarios. We used published melanoma incidence projections for Australia and the white population in the U.S.A. from 2012 through to 2031 as the baseline condition, with estimates for protective effects of ‘regular sunscreen use’ from the literature. Sunscreen prevalence was sourced from national or state surveys. Results Under a plausible public health intervention scenario comprising incremental increases in sunscreen prevalence over a 10‐year implementation programme, we estimated that cumulatively to 2031, 231 053 fewer melanomas would arise in the U.S. white population (PIF 11%) and 28 071 fewer melanomas would arise in Australia (PIF 10%). Under the theoretical maximum model of sunscreen use, almost 797 000 (PIF 38%) and approximately 96 000 (PIF 34%) melanomas would be prevented in the U.S.A. and Australia, respectively between 2012 and 2031. A sensitivity analysis using weaker effect estimates resulted in more conservative PIF estimates. Conclusions Overall, interventions to increase use of sunscreen would result in moderate reductions in melanoma incidence, assuming no compensatory overexposure to the sun. Countries with a high incidence of melanoma should monitor levels of sunscreen use in the community.

Protein structural class prediction (SCP) is as important task in identifying protein tertiary structure and protein functions. In this study, we propose a feature extraction technique to predict secondary structures. The technique utilizes bigram (of adjacent andk-separated amino acids) information derived from Position Specific Scoring Matrix (PSSM). The technique has shown promising results when evaluated on benchmarked Ding and Dubchak dataset.

Two patients with rheumatoid arthritis developed rare cutaneous lymphomas while on long-term immunosuppression: extranodal NK/T-cell lymphoma, nasal and plasmablastic lymphoma. We give an overview of these lymphomas in the context of rheumatoid arthritis and postulate whether these diagnoses could be iatrogenically induced.