Background: The secreted enzyme EndoS, an endoglycosidase from Streptococcus pyogenes, hydrolyzes the N-linked glycan of the constant region of immunoglobulin G (IgG) heavy chain and renders the antibody unable to interact with Fc receptors and elicit effector functions. In this study we couple targeted allelic replacement mutagenesis and heterologous expression to elucidate the contribution of En

X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, and magnetization measurements are employed to study the structural and magnetic properties of Mn-rich (Mn,Ga)As nanocrystals embedded in GaAs. These nanocomposites are obtained by moderate (400 C) and high temperature (560 and 630 C) annealing of (Ga,Mn)As layers with Mn concentrations between 0.1 and 2%, grown by molecular beam epitaxy at 270o

Background: Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) based screening for prostate cancer (PCa) has been shown to reduce prostate specific mortality by 20% in an intention to screen (ITS) analysis in a randomised trial (European Randomised Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer [ERSPC]). This effect may be diluted by nonattendance in men randomised to the screening arm and contamination in men randomised to

In timber housing constructions, vibrations can be a nuisance for inhabitants. Notably, the vibrational response of wooden floor systems is an issue in need of being dealt with more adequately in the designing of such buildings. Studies addressing human response to vibrations are needed in order to be able to better estimate what level of vibrations in dwellings can be seen as acceptable. In the p

BACKGROUND: We present a C++ class library for Monte Carlo simulation of molecular systems, including proteins in solution. The design is generic and highly modular, enabling multiple developers to easily implement additional features. The statistical mechanical methods are documented by extensive use of code comments that - subsequently - are collected to automatically build a web-based manual. R

Isotropic chiral media can be modelled in several ways. We show that when realizing such a medium from spiral inclusions with real permittivities and permeabilities in a periodic structure, a modified Drude–Born–Fedorov model is obtained. This model equals the original Born model for small wave vectors, but the strength of the chirality depends on the propagation direction. The effective parameter

New drugs are urgently needed for the treatment of tropical and subtropical parasitic diseases, such as African sleeping sickness. Chagas' disease, leishmaniasis and malaria. Enzymes in polyamine biosynthesis and thiol metabolism, as well as polyamine transporters, are potential drug targets within these organisms. In the present review, the current knowledge of unique properties of polyamine meta

Background: Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) is diagnosed at a metastatic stage but no diagnostic effort is spared to find the primary cancers because these will guide the treatment. Consequently, the diagnostic work-up for CUP is more comprehensive than for any other cancer, resulting in detection of second cancers unrelated to CUP. We want to use the detection rate of second cancers as a measure

Drawing on his anthropological field work in Bolivia in the midst of profound social and political change, the author examines the attitudes of various interlocutors toward knowledge, and in particular the important differences between “hegemonic theories of knowledge and indigenous epistemologies, between propositional and non-propositional knowledge, between knowledge of the world and knowledge

More reliable and faster prediction methods are needed to interpret enormous amounts of data generated by sequencing and genome projects. We have developed a new computational tool, PON-P2, for classification of amino acid substitutions in human proteins. The method is a machine learning-based classifier and groups the variants into pathogenic, neutral and unknown classes, on the basis of random f

Background Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) may cause occlusions (blockages) in the main arteries of lower limbs. One treatment option is bypass surgery using autologous (the patient's own tissue) vein graft or prosthetic (artificial) graft. A number of factors influence occlusion rates in these patients, including the material used. To prevent graft occlusion patients are usually treated with an

THE HUNTINGTON cluster (USNM 536849; Fig. 1) measures 4.1 mm in total length and is comprised of five elements of the maxillary apparatus; the first and second pair of maxillae (right and left MI and MII) and the basal plate (Bp) fitted into the bight of the right MI (for descriptive terminology for ramphoprionids, see Kielan-Jaworowska, 1966; Eriksson, 2001; Fig. 2). Both the MI are broken and la

We propose a new method to determine magnetic fields, by using the magnetic-field-induced electric dipole transition 3p(4) 3d D-4(7/2) -> 3p(5) P-3/2 in Fe9+ ions. This ion has a high abundance in astrophysical plasma and is therefore well suited for direct measurements of even rather weak fields in, e.g., solar flares. This transition is induced by an external magnetic field and its rate is propo

We present a search for a light (mass < 2 GeV) boson predicted by Hidden Valley supersymmetric models that decays into a final state consisting of collimated muons or electrons, denoted "lepton-jets". The analysis uses 5 fb(-1) of root s = 7 TeV proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider to search for the following signatures: single lepton-jets with a

Let mu be a finite positive measure on the closed disk (D) over bar in the complex plane, let 1

We have implemented intraprocedural control-flow and data-flow analysis of Java source code in a declarative manner, using reference attribute grammars augmented with circular attributes and collection attributes. Our implementation is built on top of the JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler and we have run the analyses on medium-sized Java programs. We show how the analyses can be built using sma

The temperature degradation in terahertz quantum cascade lasers is investigated with the focus on the role acoustic phonon scattering. A self-energy describing the electron-acoustic phonon interaction is derived and used to study the importance in transport and optical properties. We observe a strong degradation of the gain peak with temperature. Despite the very small coupling to electrons, the e