Purification and Characterization of a Thermostable alpha-Amylase from Bacillus licheniformis

The heat stability of a bacterial α-amylase is important for industrial starch utilization. Although extensive studies have been done on heat stable α-amylase from various bacterial species little is known about the α-amylases of Bacillus licheniformis. In order to get better understanding of thermostable amylases produced by different strains of B. licheniformis and provide information how to utilize the enzyme in starch processing, studies on purification and characterization of a commercial heat stable bacterial α-amylase from B. licheniformis BLM 1777 are reported.     

When the association between appearance and outcome contaminates social judgment: A bidirectional model linking group homogeneity and collective treatment.

Group formation is an inevitable consequence of social life, and the tendency to perceive people as a collective unit persists once they have been categorized as a group. Drawing on the concept of homogeneity, the authors propose a model suggesting that groups may endure in part because people who are perceived as homogeneous attract collective treatment (e.g., monetary rewards and punishment), and such treatment further reinforces the perception that the group’s members are homogeneous. In support of this model, more homogeneous groups attracted collective treatment and collectively treated groups seemed to be more homogeneous thereafter. The authors suggest that these effects arise in part because people intuitively believe that group homogeneity is associated with collective treatment, and they present evidence suggesting that this applies to at least one policy-relevant real-world setting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hepatitis C and G co-infection: response to interferon therapy and quantitative changes in serum HGV-RNA

Hepatitis G virus (HGV), a positive sense RNA virus, is distantly related to hepatitis C virus (HCV): its genetic organization and identity are consistent with the Flaviviridae family. Coinfection with HGV occurs in 10% to 20% of HCV-infected subjects. These similarities raise two theoretical questions. First, could HGV coinfection play any role in the response of HCV to antiviral therapy and second, would this coinfected population have changes in serum HGV-RNA induced by interferon. To address these questions, 98 patients with documented chronic HCV underwent interferon therapy (3 million units three times a week) for 6 months. Response to therapy was categorized using standard biochemical criteria. Changes in HGV-RNA levels were evaluated before, during, and after interferon therapy by a quantitative branched DNA amplification research-based assay. Eleven of 98 (11%) patients with HCV infection had detectable serum HGV-RNA. There was no difference between the groups (HGV+ vs. HGV-) when baseline alanine aminotransferase (ALT) values, HCV-RNA levels, HCV genotype, histological severity, or other demographic features were analyzed. Interferon response was similar in both groups and HGV was not associated with outcome following therapy. Antiviral therapy appeared to induce a reduction in HGV-RNA load in five of nine patients coinfected with HCV serially tested. In two patients, the fall in serum HGV-RNA correlated with biochemical response, independent of changes in HCV-RNA. These observations indicate that a larger study of an HGV population is required to more clearly define the relationship between HCV and HGV coinfection and their response to antiviral therapy.     

Urban and marine corrosion: Comparative behaviour between field and laboratory conditions

A detailed study of the corrosion phenomena of carbon steel has been investigated in this work by means of the comparison of field and laboratory tests. Two areas of the metropolitan area of Barcelona (Spain) were selected to carry out the field tests, whereas two different solutions of sodium chloride and sodium hydrogen sulfite were used to simulate the field conditions by means of cyclic laboratory tests. The corrosion rate has been evaluated from the weight loss of the specimens and the morphology surface has been visualized by optical and scanning electron microscopy. Corrosion products and contaminants have been analyzed by X‐ray diffraction and energy‐dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy, respectively. The penetration results can be adjusted to the Passano equation and the corrosivity degree can be assigned in accordance with ISO standards. A correlation between field and laboratory tests has been found, by comparing the specimens with the same degree of corrosion, showing the validity of the accelerated laboratory tests in order to simulate the field conditions.     

Functional and molecular analysis of T cell receptors used by pancreatic- and breast tumor- (mucin-) specific cytotoxic T cells

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: Appropriateness criteria and practice guidelines are being developed in attempts to improve the cost-effectiveness of medical care. The authors sought to make a set of radiology appropriateness criteria usable for education, computer-based decision support, and utilization review. MODEL DEVELOPMENT: Sixty clinical conditions from the American College of Radiology's appropriateness criteria were selected. To make the information more suitable for automation, the names of the imaging procedures were standardized. Indexing terms were assigned to identify clinical conditions and to distinguish between each condition's variants. Semantic relationships between terms were defined. Information about the clinical conditions and variants, radiologic procedures, indexing terms, and relationships was encoded into a standardized language for document interchange. IMPLEMENTATION: The 1,956 rows in the appropriateness criteria tables for the 60 clinical conditions and their 212 variants were mapped into references to 163 distinct imaging procedures. The system's knowledge base included 301 indexing terms and 569 additional terms. CONCLUSION: Radiology appropriateness criteria can be indexed and encoded into a form that facilitates their use and interchange. The use of open, internationally accepted standards is an important step to make such knowledge portable and suitable for integration with evolving computer-based patient record systems.     

Enumerating syntactical graphs and lattices of derivations

Derivations in phrase-structure grammars are by now well understood, and it is generally considered convenient to study equivalence classes of derivations rather than individual derivations themselves. It has been established that classes can be represented by canonical derivations, syntactical graphs, or derivation words, and the categorical algebra of derivations provides the framework for their study. Regarded in this way, it is known that each derivation induces a distributive lattice of subderivations. In this paper a simple algorithm is given for enumerating this lattice for any derivation. The simplicity of this algorithm depends on the nature of the topological sort which allows a canonical derivation (or derivation word) to be constructed uniquely from a syntactical graph. The enumeration algorithm constructs the members of the lattice directly. In the process a new characterization of the syntactical graphs is given using the concept of a doubly ordered graph. This characterization greatly simplifies some of the previous work in this field. A direct correspondence between these graphs and the symmetric group (set of permutations) is shown.