alireza hasanibaferani

The Schistosoma parasite is responsible for several overlooked tropical diseases, which cause significant economic losses in livestock. This parasite is increasingly found in the central areas of the northern provinces of Iran. To generate an effective treatment, it is crucial to understand thoroughly how the parasite’s genes work. Currently, the roles of numerous genes in these parasites are unknown, so their identification and targeting of them are challenging. Conventional techniques for assigning functions to proteins depend on the similarity of their sequences. Yet, this method does not always recognize similarities between distantly related proteins. Research has shown that taking the protein’s structure in the process of predicting its function can be helpful in pinpointing proteins whose functions are not known yet.

In our study, we utilized two advanced technologies, AlphaFold and Foldseek, to deduce the functions of theoretical proteins in the Schistosoma parasite. We accomplished this by contrasting the structure of Schistosoma proteins with those of Caenorhabditis elegans, a closely related model organism, using Foldseek to identify reciprocal best matches. Our research involved an in-depth examination of two specific predictions, evaluating evidence for functional resemblances, such as patterns of protein interactions and similarities in functional domains.

Our results indicate that one of the analyzed genes is likely involved in embryogenesis, while the other might be connected to the egg-laying process of the Schistosoma parasite.

Function of some hypothetical proteins can be inferred bases on their structural similarities to annotated proteins, especially proteins with a low sequence similarity to annotated proteins.

Education is one of the tools to increase the empowerment of women facilitators. For this reason, this study was conducted to investigate the educational factors affecting the empowerment of rural women facilitators in Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces. This research is field in terms of data collection and analysis and is causal in terms of possibility and ability to control variables. The period of this research was 2019 and the place of its implementation was Bushehr and Hormozgan provinces. The statistical population of the study is 850 rural women facilitators living in the two provinces (N = 850) and the sample size was 285 (n = 285) according to the Krejcie-Morgan table. The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that they are underlying factors as one of the important contexts in increasing the empowerment of women facilitators such as officials' belief in the scientific abilities of rural women facilitators, positive attitude towards education and empowerment of rural women. According to the needs assessment and climatology of the target area of women facilitators and the existence of efficient educational organizations of rural facilitators and the causal situation and background conditions of education can explain up to 43% of the variability of capabilities of women facilitators of agricultural extension. In the meantime, the components of training methods and the background conditions of education have the most positive impact on promoting the empowerment of rural women facilitators.