COVID-19 Pandemic in Brunei Darussalam

Exopolysaccharides, known as bacterial EPS, are complex sugar polymers that bacteria secrete into their environment. EPSs play a crucial role in bacterial survival and proliferation by protecting cells from environmental threats. They also contribute to proper adhesion to numerous surfaces through biofilm production. Bacterial EPS display a wide range of biological activities conferred by their outstanding physical and chemical properties, which make them great candidates for medical and industrial applications. The main biological activities recorded up-to-day include antioxidant, anticancer, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, antibacterial, immune-modulatory and chelating properties. They also can be used as thickening agents in the industry or as additives to improve soil quality in agriculture. The current review offers a thorough overview of bacterial EPS, their biosynthesis processes and regulation, and biotechnological strategies to increase their production. The review also unravels the main extraction, purification, and identification techniques and highlights the key functional features of these complex molecules.

Section: Antiviral Activitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Bacterial Exopolysaccharides: From Production to Functional Features

Talbi,

Elmarrakchy,

Youssfi

et al. 2023

“…On the 9 th March 2020, Brunei reported its first COVID-19 case involving a citizen returning from a Tablighi Jama'at in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 3 rd March 2020. By the first week of April, 71 COVID-19 cases were reported and acquired in Malaysia [64,65] . Hence, the start of the first wave of COVID-19 in Brunei.…”

Section: Bruneimentioning

confidence: 99%

Focused Review: Insight and Updates on COVID-19 from Progress in Microbes and Molecular Biology

Thye,

Law

2023

COVID-19 Bulletins from various countries have been published as the pandemic hit. This focused review provides an overview of the published COVID-19 cases, including the first case detected in respective countries, preventive measures implemented, and vaccinations available for some countries, depending on the time it was written. The countries that will be covered in this review are the United Kingdom, Spain, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Australia, South Africa, and Brunei. This review also discusses the variants of concern (VOCs) that emerged since the start of the pandemic, which include variants: Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Delta (B.1.617.2), Gamma (P.1), and Omicron (B.1.1.529). COVID-19-associated gastrointestinal manifestations and mental health implications and the application of probiotics as a potential adjunct therapy to psychotropic medications will be addressed in this review. Additional information on COVID-19 will also be reviewed, such as risk factors affecting COVID-19 case fatality rate, positive impacts of public health measures, the cost-effectiveness of public health strategies on COVID-19 control, and the COVID-19 pandemic and diet.

“…This is especially crucial with the rapid development of omics in the drug discovery process, such as the use of Support Vector Machine -Recursive Feature Elimination (SVM-RFE) as the selected feature selection method in the lung cancer multi-omics dataset integrated from three single omics datasets comprising genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics, and assess the quality of the selected feature subsets using SDAE and VAE deep learning classifiers [11] . The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has brought such a new challenge to biomedical scientists to push the frontier of biomedical research to innovate new molecules or pathways that could cut down the test-tube to market timeline [12][13][14] . This has also impacted cancer drug discovery by moving towards the use of in-silico modeling to elucidate the mechanistic pathway of newly found small molecules or proteins [15,16] that have good potential as vaccines and cancer therapeutics [17,18] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Therapeutic Targeting of MOAP-1 in Cancer: A Systematic Review of Current Approaches and Future Directions

Koong,

Look,

Abdullah

et al. 2023

The Modulator of Apoptosis 1 (MOAP-1) protein, a crucial regulator of apoptosis, has recently attracted considerable interest in oncology research. Its potential as a therapeutic target in bladder, breast, and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) offers intriguing new therapeutic approaches. This comprehensive review consolidated work on MOAP-1's role in cancer biology, notably as a therapeutic target. A systematic review was conducted by searching digital databases for studies. Based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, ten articles were thoroughly assessed. Emerging evidence links MOAP-1 to bladder cancer chemosensitivity and MOAP-1-dependent chemosensitization of breast cancer mediated by phenylquinazoline derivatives. In addition, apoptosis in breast cancer cells was induced by α-mangostin, a potential therapeutic drug targeting MOAP-1 and BCL-XL interaction. Studies showed MOAP-1's importance in NSCLC, with its upregulation in the cancer cells as a potential treatment. This review also highlights the role of miR-25 as a cellular regulator of MOAP-1 and its implication for MOAP-1-mediated therapeutics. The intricate control of MOAP-1 in cancer highlights the need for more research to understand its function and regulation across cancer types completely. MOAP-1's tumor suppressor activity suggests it could be a therapeutic target, as evidenced by current research findings, which is likely to spur further research into MOAP-1-targeted cancer treatments. This systematic review fills a gap in the literature by bringing together a variety of study findings to promote a deeper understanding of MOAP-1 and its therapeutic potential.