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The Mediterranean Large Elasmobranchs Monitoring (MEDLEM) database contains more than 3,000 records (with more than 4,000 individuals) of large elasmobranch species from 21 different countries around the Mediterranean and Black seas, observed from 1666 to 2017. The principal species included in the archive are the devil ray (1,868 individuals), the basking shark (935 individuals), the blue shark (622 individuals), and the great white shark (342 individuals). In the last decades, other species such as the thresher shark (187 individuals), the shortfin mako (180 individuals), and the spiny butterfly ray (138) were reported with increasing frequency. This was possibly due to increased public awareness on the conservation status of sharks, and the consequent development of new monitoring programs. MEDLEM does not have homogeneous reporting coverage throughout the Mediterranean and Black seas and it should be considered as a database of observed species presence. Scientific monitoring efforts in the south-eastern Mediterranean and Black seas are generally lower than in the northern sectors and the absence of some species in our database does not imply their actual absence in these regions. However, the available data allowed us to analyse the frequency and spatial distribution of records, the size frequencies for a few selected the available data allowed us to analyse the frequency and spatial distribution of records, the size frequencies for a few selected species, the overall area coverage, and which species are involved as bycatch by different fishing gears. © 2020 Mediterranean Marine Science.

The Mediterranean Large Elasmobranchs Monitoring (MEDLEM) database contains more than 3,000 records (with more than 4,000 individuals) of large elasmobranch species from 21 different countries around the Mediterranean and Black seas, observed from 1666 to 2017. The principal species included in the archive are the devil ray (1,868 individuals), the basking shark (935 individuals), the blue shark (622 individuals), and the great white shark (342 individuals). In the last decades, other species such as the thresher shark (187 individuals), the shortfin mako (180 individuals), and the spiny butterfly ray (138) were reported with increasing frequency. This was possibly due to increased public awareness on the conservation status of sharks, and the consequent development of new monitoring programs. MEDLEM does not have homogeneous reporting coverage throughout the Mediterranean and Black seas and it should be considered as a database of observed species presence. Scientific monitoring efforts in the south-eastern Mediterranean and Black seas are generally lower than in the northern sectors and the absence of some species in our database does not imply their actual absence in these regions. However,the available data allowed us to analyse the frequency and spatial distribution of records, the size frequencies for a few selected species, the overall area coverage, and which species are involved as bycatch by different fishing gears.

Promoting books and journals to the relevant research communities is an important task for major academic publishers. Unfortunately, identifying which are the best editorial products to market at a certain academic venue is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Here we present the Smart Book Recommender (SBR), an ontology-based recommender that supports the Springer Nature editorial team in selecting the editorial products to market at specific venues. SBR provides an interactive visualisation for analysing the topics characterizing conference series and books. It builds on a dataset of 27K books, journals, and conference proceedings annotated with topics from the Computer Science Ontology, a large-scale ontology of research areas. A user study showed that SBR is able to produce useful recommendations for both editors and researchers.

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring and analysing the research landscape. We recently released the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. CSO currently powers several tools adopted by the Springer Nature editorial team and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. As an effort to encourage the usage of CSO, we have developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedbacks at different levels of the ontology. In this paper, we present the CSO Classifier, an application for automatically classifying academic papers according to the rich taxonomy of topics from CSO. The aim is to facilitate the adoption of CSO across the various communities engaged with scholarly data and to foster the development of new applications based on this knowledge base.

Background: MiBIECT is a new oxadiazolyl-oxazolidinone that has been developed by means of chemoinformatic tools, synthesis and biological evaluation. This agent demonstrates potent activity against Gram-positive pathogens, including linezolid-resistant (LZDR) isolates. The aims of this study were to determine the in vitro activity of MiBIECT against a greater number of Gram-positive cocci with various resistant phenotypes, and to evaluate MiBIECT for in vitro cytotoxicity. Methods: A total of 340 strains of linezolid-susceptible (LZD-S) S. aureus, S. epidermidis, enterococci, S. pneumoniae, S. pyogenes and 20 LZDR strains were analyzed. MiBIECT was evaluated for its in vitro antibacterial activity by determining the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) by the CLSI broth microdilution methods. In vitro cytotoxicity assays in cell lines representative of excretory organs were used to evaluate for potential safety concerns. Results: MiBIECT exhibited potent activity against S. aureus, S. epidermidis, S. pneumoniae and S. pyogenes with MICs in range of <0.06 - 1 mcg/mL. MiBIECT MIC values were 2-3 and 4 dilutions lower for LZD-S and LZD-R strains, respectively, compared to linezolid. In vitro cytotoxicity experiments indicated that MIBIECT has a similar effect on cell viability as linezolid with fewer effects on mammalian mitochondrial protein synthesis inhibition. Conclusions: MiBIECT demonstrated potent in vitro activity against Gram-positive bacteria, with little toxicity against various cell lines. The in vitro activity of this investigational agent was maintained against LZDR isolates. Thus, further studies are warranted to determine the potential utility of this agent in the treatment of Gram-positive bacterial infections

The effects of side chain modification and chirality in linezolid-like 1,2,4-oxadiazoles have been studied to design new potent antibacterials against Gram-positive multidrug-resistant pathogens. The adopted strategy involved a molecular modelling approach, the synthesis and biological evaluation of new designed compounds, enantiomers separation and absolute configuration assignment. Experimental determination of the antibacterial activity of the designed (S)-1-((3-(4-(3-methyl-1,2,4-oxadiazol-5-yl)phenyl)-oxazolidin-2-one-5-yl)methyl)-3-methylthiourea and (S)-1-((3-(3-fluoro-4-(3-methyl-1,2,4-oxadiazol-5-yl)phenyl)-oxazolidin-2-one-5-yl)methyl)-3-methylthiourea against multidrug resistant linezolid bacterial strains was higher than that of linezolid.

The synthesis and the in vitro antibacterial activity of novel linezolid-like oxadiazoles is reported. Replacement of the linezolid morpholine C-ring with 1,2,4-oxadiazole results in an antibacterial activity against Staphylococcus aureus both methicillin-susceptible and methicillin-resistant comparable or even superior to that of linezolid. While acetamidomethyl or thioacetoamidomethyl moieties in the C(5) side-chain are required, fluorination of the phenyl B ring exhibits a slight effect on an antibacterial activity but its presence seems to reduce the compounds cytotoxicity. Molecular modeling performed using two different approaches - FLAP and Amber software - shows that in the binding pose of the newly synthesized compounds as compared with the crystallographic pose of linezolid, the 1,2,4-oxadiazole moiety seems to perfectly mimic the function of the morpholinic ring, since the H-bond interaction with U2585 is retained

In the present study the synthesis of new Linezolid-like molecules has been achieved by substitution of the oxazolidinone central heterocyclic moiety with a 1,2,4-oxadiazole ring. Two series of 1,2,4-oxadiazoles, bearing different side-chains and containing a varying number of fluorine atoms, were synthesized and preliminarily tested for biological activity against some Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria using Linezolid and Ceftriaxone as reference drugs

The design, synthesis, and antibacterial activity of 4-alkyliden-azetidin-2-ones as new antimicrobial agents against multidrug-resistant pathogens is reported. 4-Alkyliden-azetidin-2-ones were easily obtained using an original protocol starting from 4-acetoxy-azetidinones and diazoesters. Parent compounds were further elaborated to obtain a small library of 4-alkylidene derivatives. A molecular modeling approach using GRID descriptors based on the concept of VRS identified attractive drug candidates and contributed to the rationalization of functional group effects in QSARs. The in vitro antibacterial activity of the new agents was evaluated against 43 recent clinical isolates of antibiotic-susceptible and -resistant Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens by determining their minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs). The most active compound showed MIC values ranging from 0.25 to 32 mg/L against some of the bacterial species tested. Interestingly, some compounds demonstrated similar activity against methicillin-susceptible and -resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus suggesting possible alternative mechanisms of action of these agents, supported by citotoxicity and preliminary scanning electron microscopy studies.