Ten simple rules for establishing a mentorship programme.

In recent years, a wide variety of mentorship programmes targeting issues that cannot be addressed through traditional teaching and learning methods alone have been developed. Mentoring plays significant roles in the growth and development of both mentors and mentees, and the positive impacts of mentoring have been well documented. Mentorship programmes are therefore increasingly being implemented in a wide variety of fields by organisations, academic institutes, businesses, and governments. While there is a growing body of literature on mentoring and mentorship programmes, gaining a clear overview of the field is often challenging. In this article, we therefore provide a concise summary of recommendations to consider when designing and establishing mentorship programmes. These recommendations are based on the collective knowledge and experiences of 4 different emerging and established mentorship programmes and can be adapted across various mentorship settings or contexts.

A reproducible picture of open access health facility data in Africa and R tools to support improvement.

Background: Open data on the locations and services provided by health facilities have, in some countries, allowed the development of software tools contributing to COVID-19 response. The UN and WHO encourage countries to make health facility location data open, to encourage use and improvement. We provide a summary of open access health facility location data in Africa using re-useable R code. We aim to support data analysts developing software tools to address COVID-19 response in individual countries. In Africa there are currently three main sources of such open data; 1) direct from national ministries of health, 2) a database for sub-Saharan Africa collated and published by a team from KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme and now hosted by WHO, and 3) The Global Healthsites Mapping Project in collaboration with OpenStreetMap.      Methods: We searched for and documented official national facility location data that were openly available. We developed re-useable open-source R code to summarise and visualise facility location data by country from the three sources. This re-useable code is used to provide a web user interface allowing data exploration through maps and plots of facility type. Results: Out of 52 African countries, seven currently provide an official open facility list that can be downloaded and analysed reproducibly. Considering all three sources, there are over 185,000 health facility locations available for Africa. However, there are differences and overlaps between sources and a lack of data on capacities and service provision. Conclusions: These summaries and software tools can be used to encourage greater use of existing health facility location data, incentivise further improvements in the provision of those data by national suppliers, and encourage collaboration within wider data communities. The tools are a part of the afrimapr project, actively developing R building blocks to facilitate the use of health data in Africa.

The complete genome sequence of the lumpy skin disease virus vaccine Herbivac LS reveals a mutation in the superoxide dismutase gene homolog.

The lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) vaccine, Herbivac LS, batch 008, was sequenced and found to differ from the Neethling vaccine strain in the locus encoding a superoxide dismutase (SOD) homolog. The presence of a SOD homolog, be it full-length (as in Herbivac LS) or truncated (as in Neethling) may affect vaccine immunogenicity.

The complete genome sequences of poxviruses isolated from a penguin and a pigeon in South Africa and comparison to other sequenced avipoxviruses.

BACKGROUND: Two novel avipoxviruses from South Africa have been sequenced, one from a Feral Pigeon (Columba livia) (FeP2) and the other from an African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) (PEPV). We present a purpose-designed bioinformatics pipeline for analysis of next generation sequence data of avian poxviruses and compare the different avipoxviruses sequenced to date with specific emphasis on their evolution and gene content. RESULTS: The FeP2 (282 kbp) and PEPV (306 kbp) genomes encode 271 and 284 open reading frames respectively and are more closely related to one another (94.4%) than to either fowlpox virus (FWPV) (85.3% and 84.0% respectively) or Canarypox virus (CNPV) (62.0% and 63.4% respectively). Overall, FeP2, PEPV and FWPV have syntenic gene arrangements; however, major differences exist throughout their genomes. The most striking difference between FeP2 and the FWPV-like avipoxviruses is a large deletion of ~16 kbp from the central region of the genome of FeP2 deleting a cc-chemokine-like gene, two Variola virus B22R orthologues, an N1R/p28-like gene and a V-type Ig domain family gene. FeP2 and PEPV both encode orthologues of vaccinia virus C7L and Interleukin 10. PEPV contains a 77 amino acid long orthologue of Ubiquitin sharing 97% amino acid identity to human ubiquitin. CONCLUSIONS: The genome sequences of FeP2 and PEPV have greatly added to the limited repository of genomic information available for the Avipoxvirus genus. In the comparison of FeP2 and PEPV to existing sequences, FWPV and CNPV, we have established insights into African avipoxvirus evolution. Our data supports the independent evolution of these South African avipoxviruses from a common ancestral virus to FWPV and CNPV.

Extending the sRNAome of apple by next-generation sequencing.

The global importance of apple as a fruit crop necessitates investigations into molecular aspects of the processes that influence fruit quality and yield, including plant development, fruit ripening and disease resistance. In order to study and understand biological processes it is essential to recognise the range of molecules, which influence these processes. Small non-coding RNAs are regulatory agents involved in diverse plant activities, ranging from development to stress response. The occurrence of these molecules in apple leaves was studied by means of next-generation sequencing. 85 novel microRNA (miRNA) gene loci were predicted and characterized along with known miRNA loci. Both cis- and trans-natural antisense transcript pairs were identified. Although the trans-overlapping regions were enriched in small RNA (sRNA) production, cis-overlaps did not seem to agree. More than 150 phased regions were also identified, and for a small subset of these, potential miRNAs that could initiate phasing, were revealed. Repeat-associated siRNAs, which are generated from repetitive genomic regions such as transposons, were also analysed. For this group almost all available repeat sequences, associated with the apple genome and present in Repbase, were found to produce siRNAs. Results from this study extend our current knowledge on apple sRNAs and their precursors significantly. A rich molecular resource has been created and is available to the research community to serve as a baseline for future studies.