The σ factors ofMycobacterium tuberculosis

Genotyping ofMycobacterium tuberculosis in China and Missing Links in the Chain of Ongoing Transmission of Tuberculosis

Worldwide, the epidemiology of tuberculosis varies widely from an uncommon disease refueled by immigration to highly endemic, with ongoing transmission as the driving force. Countries with the highest incidence rates are found in subSaharan Africa, whereas the highest absolute numbers of cases are recorded in India and China. The latter countries experience intermediate incidence rates, but hav...

Original Contribution Contribution of Seasonality in Transmission ofMycobacterium tuberculosis to Seasonality in Tuberculosis Disease: A Simulation Study

A seasonal rise in tuberculosis (TB) notifications has been confirmed in several studies. Here, we examined one hypothesis for its cause: increased transmission of TB during wintertime due to crowding. Seasonality analysis was performed on actual and simulated notifications of clustered TB cases, which are considered to be representative of recent transmission, diagnosed from 1993 to 2004 in th...

The σ enigma: Bacterial σ factors, archaeal TFB and eukaryotic TFIIB are homologs

Structural comparisons of initiating RNA polymerase complexes and structure-based amino acid sequence alignments of general transcription initiation factors (eukaryotic TFIIB, archaeal TFB and bacterial σ factors) show that these proteins are homologs. TFIIB and TFB each have two-five-helix cyclin-like repeats (CLRs) that include a C-terminal helix-turn-helix (HTH) motif (CLR/HTH domains). Four...

Nonlinear σ-model, form factors and universality

We report the results of a very high statistics Monte Carlo study of the continuum limit of the two dimensional O(3) non-linear σ model. We find a significant discrepancy between the continuum extrapolation of our data and the form factor prediction of Balog and Niedermaier, inspired by the Zamolodchikovs’ S-matrix ansatz. On the other hand our results for the O(3) and the dodecahedron model ar...

σ-Normality of Topological Spaces