BACKGROUND Speeding up identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is of foremost importance in the management of blood cultures. Here, we describe a simple, rapid, and standardized approach based on a very short-term incubation on solid medium from positive blood cultures followed by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry identification and automated AST. The aim of the study was to eva...

This study aims to modify a cyclodextrin-PEI-based polymer, PEI-β-CyD, with the TAT peptide for plasmid DNA delivery to placenta mesenchymal stem cells (PMSCs). By using the disulfide exchange between the SPDP-activated PEI-β-CyD and TAT peptide, the TAT-PEI-β-CyD polymer was fabricated and the success of this was confirmed by the presence of characteristic peaks for PEI (at δ 2.8-3.2 ppm), CyD...

OBJECTIVES Sign-out (SO) is a challenge to the emergency physician. Some training programs have instituted overlapping 9-hour shifts. The residents see patients for eight hours, and have one hour of wrap-up time. This hour helps them complete patient care, leaving fewer patients to sign-out. We examined whether this strategy impacts SO burden. METHODS This is a retrospective review of patient...

BACKGROUND Patients on haemodialysis (HD) are at an increased risk of sustaining thrombotic events especially to their vascular access which is essential for maintenance of HD. OBJECTIVES To assess whether 1) markers of coagulation, fibrinolysis or endothelial activation are increased in patients on HD compared to controls and 2) if measurement of any of these factors could help to identify p...

AIMS Thromboembolic complications have been reported after radiofrequency ablation but the low incidence of overt clinical events has been a limitation to the study of factors affecting thrombogenic risk. The aim of this study was to determine whether radiofrequency ablation has a procoagulant effect and to examine variables that affect thrombio generation. METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty-seven co...

There are three prominent solutions to the Darwinian problem of altruism, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and trait group selection. Only one, reciprocal altruism, most commonly implemented in game theory as a TIT FOR TAT strategy, is not based on the principle of conditional association. On the contrary, TIT FOR TAT implements conditional altruism in the context of unconditionally determin...

BACKGROUND The South African National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) responded to HIV treatment initiatives with two-tiered CD4 laboratory services in 2004. Increasing programmatic burden, as more patients access anti-retroviral therapy (ART), has demanded extending CD4 services to meet increasing clinical needs. The aim of this study was to review existing services and develop a service-mode...

In the race against Moores Law, integrated chips (ICs) with multiple dies stacked over one another and connected by ThroughSilicon Vias (TSVs), called 3D TSV-Stacked ICs (SICs) have attracted a fair amount of research [1]–[5]. Due to imperfections in IC manufacturing, each individual chip must be tested. Testing each IC, increases cost, which is highly related to the testing time spent on each ...

PURPOSE The cell cycle inhibitor p15(INK4b) has been localized in migrating corneal epithelial cells. In this study, TAT-fusion protein technology was used to transduce p15(INK4b) into human corneal epithelial cells to examine the effect on cell proliferation and migration. METHODS Human p15(INK4b), obtained by RT-PCR, was cloned into a TAT-HA vector, and the fusion protein was purified from ...

This paper investigates in terms of Kolmogorov complexity the diierences between the information necessary to compute a recursive function and the information contained in its graph. Our rst result is that the complexity of the initial parts of the graph of a recursive function, although bounded, has almost never a limit. The second result is that the complexity of these initial parts approxima...