Reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) is prone to false positives when contaminating DNA molecules are present at the start of a reaction. Contaminants that derive from earlier work using a given primer pair (carryover PCR products) are of particular concern when those primers are used routinely, as in clinical diagnostics or environmental monitoring. In addition, contamination by genomic DNA can ...

Foods contaminated with Escherichia coli O157:H7 cause more than 63,000 foodborne illnesses in the United States every year, resulting in a significant economic impact on medical costs and product liabilities. Efforts to reduce contamination with E. coli O157:H7 have largely focused on washing, application of various antibacterial chemicals, and gamma-irradiation, each of which has practical an...

We suggest a uniform game-theoretic approach to " width' graph parameters. We consider a search problem on a graph in which one cop in a helicopter flying from vertex to vertex tries to catch the robber. The existence of the winning program for the cop in this problem depends only on the robber's speed. We investigate the problem of finding the minimal robber's speed which prevents the cop from...

The control of Salmonella in animal feedstuffs is important, principally to protect the human food chain from contamination by Salmonella derived from infected animals. The transmission of Salmonella from animal feeds to animals, and onward to human food products, has been convincingly documented. This is especially important for chicken breeding and laying flocks and pigs, in view of the conse...

We consider the problem of decontaminating an infected network using as few mobile cleaning agents as possible and avoiding recontamination. After a cleaning agent has left a vertex v, this vertex will become recontaminated if m or more of its neighbours are infected, where m ≥ 1 is a threshold parameter of the system indicating the local immunity level of the network. This network decontaminat...

UNGG cladding nuclear wastes constitute a huge volume of Mg-based materials that raises economic and safety concerns, particularly due to their radioactivity coupled the potential generation H2 gas under deep underground disposal. Their significant decontamination would result in more secure less expensive storage, with better containment separated long-lived radioisotopes could enter classical...

Protecting fresh-packed produce microbiological safety against pre- and post-harvest microbial pathogen contamination requires innovative antimicrobial strategies. Although largely ignored in the scientific literature, there exists potential for gross failure food protection of fresh fruits vegetables leading to opportunity multiple events occur during production handling crops. The primary obj...

The Grenlandfjords in South East Norway are severely contaminated with dioxins from a magnesium smelter operated between 1950 and 2001. In 2009, the proposal of thin-layer capping as potential mitigation method to reduce spreading fjord sediments, resulted set-up large-scale field experiment two areas at 30 100 m depth. After capping, several investigations have been carried out determine effec...

In general, graph search can be described in terms of a sequence of searchers’ moves on a graph, able to capture a fugitive resorting on its vertices/edges. Several variations of graph search have been introduced, differing on the abilities of the fugitive as well as of the search. In this paper, we examine the case where the fugitive is inert, i.e., it moves only whenever the search is about t...