Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is the almost the severest hemoglobinopathy known with no cure till date. Patients with SCA has a shorter lifespan and suffer from painful crises and end-organ damages. The goal of this in silico work is to find the consensus miRNAs targeting KLF1 gene, responsible for HbF-to-HbA switching followed by generating the corresponding miRNA sponge for gene silencing purposes. 3 publicly available databases were searched, miRDB, miRWalk and TargetScan. Afterwards, the hybridization examination of the predicted miRNAs was evaluated. Finally, the design of miRNA sponge as a means to target miRNA was performed. In conclusion, hsa-miR-330-5p was the best miRNA targeting KLF1 gene in many aspects and its miRNA sponge sequence was provided.

Human arginase is a multifaceted enzyme that can be utilized for various medical and industrial applications. However, no report explored the in-silico engineering of this novel enzyme. The crystal structure of human arginase 1 was downloaded from PDB and had its quality checked prior to further analysis. Afterwards, CUPSAT and DeepDDG webservers were employed to nominate the most stable variants which were prepared by UCSF Chimera v1.16 and refined by GalaxyRefine tool. Docking (to reference substrate and inhibitor), stability confirmation and dynamics simulations were conducted. G119L was the best in all the mentioned aspects which was afterwards in silico cloned as a final step. Accordingly, G119L is a valuable arginase mutant that deserves its experimental validation.

Background and objective: Peroxidase is an oxidoreductase that uses different compounds as substrates and thus can be utilized for different applications. The goal of this work is to isolate peroxidase from lemon peels using Three-Phase Portioning (TPP). Methods: TPP was set by adding varying amounts of salts and alcohol and the enzyme activity recovery was measured for each variable. Different parameters were optimized successively in order to achieve the highest enzyme activity recovery including salt type, salt concentration, pH, alcohol/crude extract ratio and type of alcohol and then, combining all optimized conditions together. Results: Salt that gave maximal recovery was sodium potassium tartrate, optimal salt concentration was 15%, optimal pH was 8, optimal alcohol/crude extract ratio was 1 and t-butanol was preferred to 1-butanol. Efficiently, upon combining all optimized factors, an activity recovery of 175% was obtained. Conclusion: This protocol provides an easy, feasible method to efficiently isolate peroxidase from lemon peels using TPP.

The emergence of porphyromonas gingivalis biofilm is a hallmark of risky burden diseases including Alzheimer's disease and atherosclerosis. The current study aims to screen some natural essential oil compounds and coumarin derivatives to interfere with quorum sensing of the bacterium and thus biofilm formation. A total of 20 ligands (10 essential oil molecules and 10 coumarin derivatives) were docked to P.gingivalis heme-binding protein HmuY using UCSF Chimera built-in AutoDock interface. Alongside, ADMET properties were also predicted via ADMETsar 2.0 and ProTox-II webservers. All of the selected ligands had higher free energy values than the reference inhibitor MES and native coumarin as well. Moreover, ADME parameters are in good agreement with Lipinski's rule of five. Nevertheless, the best molecules with top binding energy exhibited slight immunogenicity as well as carcinogenicity issues requiring in vitro confirmation. In conclusion, the tested ligands had better efficacy against P.gingivalis quorum sensing and biofilm.