Antiretroviral drug resistance following pMTCT strategies remains a significant problem. With rapid advancements in next generation sequencing technologies, there is more focus on HIV drug-resistant variants of low frequency, or the so-called minority variants. In South Africa, AZT monotherapy for pMTCT, similar to World Health Organization option A, has been used since 2008. In 2010, a single ...

Impact assessments of virus resistance transgene introgression into wild, free-living populations are important for determining whether these transgenes present a risk to agriculture or the environment. Transgenic virus-resistant Cucurbita pepo ssp. ovifera var. ovifera L. (squash) cultivars have been commercialized, and may be cultivated in close proximity to cross-compatible wild, free-living...

race-specific resistance of wheat to yellow rust caused by puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici has been reported as short-lived. partial resistance, a kind of quantitative resistance, has been reported to be more stable. partial resistance in terms of slow rusting parameters including final rust severity (frs), apparent infection rate (r), relative area under disease progress curve (raudpc), an...

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are plants or animals whose genetic make-up has been transformed by recombinant DNA technology, which has new features such as resistance to herbicides, virus and insect. Recently, genetic modification of food products has increased in order to reduce world poverty and hunger and increase food production However, the impact of GMOs on the human health is a ...

There are many goals for an AI that could become dangerous if the AI becomes superintelligent or otherwise powerful. Much work on the AI control problem has been focused on constructing AI goals that are safe even for such AIs. This paper looks at an alternative approach: defining a general concept of ‘low impact’. The aim is to ensure that a powerful AI which implements low impact will not mod...

A new approach based concepts of the Discrete Element Method, is presented for impact resistance analysis of composites. The method is capable of analysing the progressive fracturing and fragmentation behaviour as well as potential post cracking interactions caused by the newly created crack sides and segments. The imminence of a material crack is monitored by an anisotropic Hoffman model . To ...

IMPACT TESTS are used to study dynamic deformation and failure modes of materials. Low-velocity impact techniques can be classified as plate-on-plate, rod-on-plate, plate-onrod, or rod-on-rod experiments. Two types of plate-on-plate impact tests have been developed: wave propagation experiments and thin-layer high-strain-rate experiments. The plate-on-plate experiments are further classified as...

The role of particle-toughening for increasing impact damage resistance in carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites was investigated. Five carbon fibre reinforced systems consisting of four particle-toughened matrices and one system containing no toughening particles were subjected to low velocity impacts ranging from 25 J to 50 J to establish the impact damage resistance of each mater...

BACKGROUND Drug-resistance mutations (DRAM) are frequently selected in patients with virological failure defined as viral load (pVL) above 500 copies/ml (c/mL), but few resistance data are available at low-level viremia (LLV). Our objective was to determine the emergence and evolution of DRAM during LLV in HIV-1-infected patients while receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART). METHODS Retrospec...