Mussels are used as sentinel organisms and bioindicators to evaluate the toxic effects of chemical pollutants in marine organisms, especially heavy metals, representing an important tool for biomonitoring environmental pollution in coastal areas. Antioxidant defence enzymes play an important role in cellular antioxidant defence systems and protect from oxidative damage by reactive oxygen specie...

The topic of finding an effective strategy to halt virus in a complex network is of current interest. We propose an immunization strategy for seasonal epidemics that occur periodically. Based on the local information of the infection status from the previous epidemic season, the selection of vaccinated nodes is optimized gradually. The evolution of vaccinated nodes during iterations demonstrate...

BACKGROUND This study, the first of its kind carried out at sub-national level in Ethiopia, was conducted in order to understand the dynamics of HIV transmission at regional and district level in Tigrai, Ethiopia; and to assess the adequacy of the HIV prevention response. METHODS Routine data from health centres, data from available published and grey literature and studies, and primary quali...

BACKGROUND Previous research indicates that individuals with seasonal depression (SD) do not exhibit the memory biases for negative self-referent information that characterize non-seasonal depression (NSD). The current study extended this work by examining processing of self-referent emotional information concerning potential future events in SD. METHOD SD and NSD patients, along with never-d...

To determine the associations of fecundity and childlessness with month of conception and to find a causal mechanism for these associations, we reanalyzed some of our previous data according to the predictions of the seasonal optimal ripening oocyte (SOptRO) and seasonal preovulatory over-ripeness ovopathy (SPrOO) hypotheses. Prime and minor SOptRO months as well as high-risk, no-risk, and very...

BACKGROUND In animals, the circadian pacemaker regulates seasonal changes in behavior by transmitting a signal of day length to other sites in the organism. The signal is expressed reciprocally in the duration of nocturnal melatonin secretion, which is longer in winter than in summer. We investigated whether such a signal could mediate the effects of change of season on patients with seasonal a...