Foraminiferal assemblage structure from Brazilian tropical urbanized beaches (~7°S).

Foraminifera are diversified protists with high ecological and bioindicator importance. Physical-chemical parameters of the environment can be evaluated through the taphonomic analysis of the test coloring, because once they settle in the sediment their tests begin to behave as sedimentary particles. Five urbanized tropical Brazilian beaches were sampled in this study in order to characterize the diversity, abundance, taxonomic and taphonomic structure of Foraminifera assemblages. General environmental characterization such as granulometric analysis, temperature and salinity was also performed. A total of 69 foraminiferan species were found, dominated by Quinqueloculina lamarckiana, Archaias angulatus, Amphistegina lessonii, Ammonia tepida and Eponides repandus. A large predominance of dead tests (>90%) was found, and only them were considered in further analyses. The cluster based on the taxonomic composition formed two groups, separating Miramar from the other beaches. Miramar was dominated by Ammonia tepida (18.9%), Sorites marginalis (16.8%), Quinqueloculina lamarckiana (13.9%) and Textularia agglutinans (10.2%), and had the highest density, number of species and diversity, what may be related with the sheltered nature of this beach and the dominance of fine sand. The other four beaches have high oceanic influence and the medium and coarse sand predominated. In these beaches Quinqueloculina lamarckiana dominated, representing between 30.9 and 38.7% of total foraminiferans. The taphonomic analysis indicates that Miramar presents a high deposition of tests and a low hydrodynamic energy, since the majority of tests were white. In Bessa, Manaíra and Seixas most of the tests were brownish, which is characteristic of beaches with high hydrodynamic energy, which causes the tests to be constantly brought to the oxidation zone.

Provir/Latitude 45 study: A step towards a multi-epitopic CTL vaccine designed on archived HIV-1 DNA and according to dominant HLA I alleles.

One of the approaches by which the scientific community is seeking to cure HIV is the use of therapeutic vaccination. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of the virus-specific CD8+ T cell cytotoxic responses for the immune control of HIV and have oriented research on vaccine constructs based on CTL epitopes from circulating HIV-1 strains. The clinical trials with therapeutic vaccines to date have had limited success likely due to (i) a discrepancy between archived CTL epitopes in the viral reservoir and those in circulating viruses before antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation and (ii) the lack of strong affinity between the selected CTL epitopes and the HLA grooves for presentation to CD8+ cells. To overcome these limitations, we launched the Provir/Latitude 45 study to identify conserved CTL epitopes in archived HIV-1 DNA according to the HLA class I alleles of aviremic patients, most of whom are under ART. The near full-length genomes or Gag, Pol and Nef regions of proviral DNA were sequenced by Sanger and/or Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). The HLA-A and B alleles were defined by NGS or molecular analysis. The TuTuGenetics software, which moves a sliding window of 8 to 10 amino acids through the amino acid alignment, was combined with the Immune Epitope Data Base (IEDB) to automatically calculate the theoretical binding affinity of identified epitopes to the HLA alleles for each individual. We identified 15 conserved epitopes in Pol (11), Gag (3), and Nef (1) according to their potential presentation by the dominant HLA-A and B alleles and now propose to use the corresponding conserved peptides in a multi-epitopic vaccine (HLA-fitted VAC, HFVAC).