© The Author 2020. Published by ARDA. Abstract Clean water is essential to our existence and problems might arise when it becomes contaminated with different pathogens, which might pose a threat to human health. Tap water is generally considered drinkable since it passes different forms of disinfection during processing. Some households have additional disinfection procedures, the most common one being the usage of charcoal filters, in order to further clean the tap water from both undesirable solvents and microorganisms. In the first independent study of this kind, we have tested tap water for bacteria from five different locations in Sarajevo, and we have tested the efficiency of charcoal filter in trapping of bacteria. According to regulations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, there should be 1 colony forming unit (CFU) per 50ul of water sample, which was satisfied in only one location from Sarajevo, while one had significantly higher levels (6.7, p val. 0.0148). Overall, the charcoal filter has decreased the number of bacteria in the water, with the exception of one sample.

Increasing evidence is demonstrating that a patient’s unique genetic profile can be used to detect the disease’s onset, prevent its progression, and optimize its treatment. This led to the increased global efforts to implement personalized medicine (PM) and pharmacogenomics (PG) in clinical practice. Here we investigated the perceptions of students from different universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) towards PG/PM as well as related ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI). This descriptive, cross-sectional study is based on the survey of 559 students from the Faculties of Medicine, Pharmacy, Health Studies, Genetics, and Bioengineering and other study programs. Our results showed that 50% of students heard about personal genome testing companies and 69% consider having a genetic test done. A majority of students (57%) agreed that PM represents a promising healthcare model, and 40% of students agreed that their study program is well designed for understanding PG/PM. This latter opinion seems to be particularly influenced by the field of study (7.23, CI 1.99–26.2, p = 0.003). Students with this opinion are also more willing to continue their postgraduate education in the PM (OR = 4.68, CI 2.59–8.47, p < 0.001). Furthermore, 45% of students are aware of different ethical aspects of genetic testing, with most of them (46%) being concerned about the patient’s privacy. Our results indicate a positive attitude of biomedical students in Bosnia and Herzegovina towards genetic testing and personalized medicine. Importantly, our results emphasize the key importance of pharmacogenomic education for more efficient translation of precision medicine into clinical practice.

Chou, and Fasman developed the first empirical prediction method to predict secondary structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Subsequently, a more sophisticated GOR method has been developed. Although it became very popular among biologists, their accuracy was only slightly better than random. A significant improvement in prediction accuracy >70% has been achieved by ‘second generation’ methods such as PHD, SAM-T98, and PSIPRED, which utilized information concerning sequence conservation. Only recently F. B. Akcesme developed a local similarity based method to obtain an accuracy >90%in secondary structure prediction of any new protein. In this article we examined the possibility of sequence similarity based secondary structure prediction of proteins. To deal with this issue, all proteins of PDB dataset are searched for identical subsequences in the other larger proteins of PDB dataset. It is seen that around 17% of proteins in the PDB dataset have identical subsequences in other larger proteins of PDB dataset. When the secondary structures of proteins are assigned as the corresponding secondary structures of identical parts in other larger proteins, the average prediction accuracy is found to be 90.39 %. Therefore, we concluded that an unknown protein has a chance of 17 % to have an identical subsequence in a larger protein in Protein Data Bank (PDB), and there is a possibility that its secondary structure be predicted with around 90% accuracy with this method.

Experimental methods used for characterizing epitopes that play a vital role in the development of peptide vaccines, in diagnosis of diseases, and also for allergy research are time consuming and need There are many online epitope prediction tools that can help experimenters in short listing the candidate peptides. To predict B epitopes in an antigenic sequence, Jordan recurrent neural network (JRNN) are found to be more successful. To train and test neural networks, 262.583 B epitopes are retrieved from IEDB database. 99.9% of these epitopes have lengths in the interval 6-25 amino acids. For each of these lengths, committees of 11 expert recurrent neural networks are trained. To train these experts alongside epitopes, non needed. Non-epitopes are created as random sequences of amino acids of the same length followed by a filtering process. To distinguish epitopes and non-epitopes, the votes of eleven experts are aggrega vote. An overall accuracy of 97.23% is achieved. Then these experts are used to predict the linear b epitopes of antigen, ESAT6 (Tuberculosis).