Vibrio vulnificus is a causative agent of serious food-borne diseases in humans related to consumption of raw seafoods. This human pathogen secretes a metalloprotease (VVP) that evokes enhancement of the vascular permeability and disruption of the capillaries. Production of microbial proteases is generally induced at early stationary phase of its growth. This cell density dependent regulation o...

Peer-to-peer systems (P2P) have become a popular technique to design large-scale distributed applications in unmanaged inter-domain settings, such as file sharing or chat systems, thanks to their capabilities to self-organize and evenly split the load among peers. Recently, enterprises owning a large IT hardware and software infrastructure started looking at these P2P technologies as a mean bot...

A multi-site system consists of a collection of locallymanaged networks called sites, each containing a collection of processors. In this paper, we present the multi-site threshold model: a new failure model for multi-site systems that accounts for failures of sites. Using this model, we then derive quorum constructions that have two interesting features. First, they generate quorum systems tha...

A distributed mobility management scheme using a class of Uniform Quorum Systems (UQS) is proposed for ad-hoc networks. In the proposed scheme, location databases are stored in the network nodes themselves, which form a self-organizing virtual backbone within the flat network structure. The databases are dynamically organized into quorums, every two of which intersect at a constant number of da...

Bacterial conversations: talking, listening and eavesdropping. An introduction 1115 I. Joint, J. Allan Downie & P. Williams Look who’s talking: communication and quorum sensing in the bacterial world 1119 P. Williams, K. Winzer, W. C. Chan & M. Cámara Cell–cell communication in the plant pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens 1135 C. E. White & S. C. Winans Quorum-sensing regulation in rhizobia and...

Quorum-sensing systems control major virulence determinants in Enterococcusfaecalis, which causes nosocomial infections. The E. faecalis quorum-sensing systems include several virulence factors that are regulated by the cytolysin operon, which encodes the cytolysin toxin. In addition, the E. faecalis Fsr regulator system controls the expression of gelatinase, serine protease, and enterocin O16....

Rapid developments in network systems of business service have resulted in more reliance on distributed computing, typified by "subscriber/push" architectures. Unfortunately, frequent and unexpectable network failures were routine, and downtime was not in hours, but in days. High availability has become the most important factor decreasing business risk and improving Quality of Service. Cluster...

Quorum-based schemes, e.g., GQS, can ensure asynchronous neighbors to discover each other within bounded time under low-duty-cycle operations. But they are tightly based on the assumption that duty cycles of devices fit some specific prefixed patterns. We tackle this problem by proposing a distributed quorum system to speed up the discovery.

The production of several virulence factors by Pseudomonas aeruginosa is controlled according to cell density through two quorum-sensing systems, las and rhl. The las system is comprised of the transcriptional activator protein LasR and of LasI, which directs the synthesis of the autoinducer PAI-1. Similarly, the rhl system consists of the transcriptional activator protein RhlR and of RhlI, whi...

Due to the heterogenous power-saving requirement in wireless sensor networks, we propose the Cyclic Quorum System Pair (CQS-Pair) which can guarantee that two asynchronous nodes adopt different cyclic quorum systems can hear each other at least once in bounded time intervals. To quickly assemble a CQS-Pair, we present a fast construction scheme, which is based on the Multiplier Theorem and the ...