Plant alkaloids, one of the largest groups of natural products, provide many pharmacologically active compounds. Several genes in the biosynthetic pathways for scopolamine, nicotine, and berberine have been cloned, making the metabolic engineering of these alkaloids possible. Expression of two branching-point enzymes was engineered: putrescine N-methyltransferase (PMT) in transgenic plants of A...

OBJECTIVE To assess health protection motivation as explained by the constructs of protection motivation theory (PMT) and its association with drug trafficking over 2 years. METHODS The sample included 817 African American youth (13-16 years old) participating in an adolescent risk-reduction program. We developed an instrument measuring the level of health protection motivation (LHPM) using f...

Multianode photomultiplier tube (PMT) arrays are finding application as convenient high-speed light sensitive devices for plasma imaging. This paper describes the development of a USB-based "plug-n-play" 16-channel PMT camera with 16 bits simultaneous acquisition of 16 signal channels at rates up to 2 MSs per channel. The preamplifiers and digital hardware are packaged in a compact housing whic...

Protein O-mannosyltransferases initiate O mannosylation of secretory proteins, which are of fundamental importance in eukaryotes. In this study, the PMT gene family of the human fungal pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus was identified and characterized. Unlike the case in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, where the PMT family is highly redundant, only one member of each PMT subfamily, namely, Afpmt1, Afpmt...

A scale-up design procedure, based on a new physical mass transfer (PMT) model, whichdescribes the performance, for aerobic rotating biological contactors (RBC’s) is developed. This scale-up procedure can be used to determine the disc surface area needed to prevent an oxygen limitation or to obtain a specific degree of treatment. In contrast to the empirical, and most previous RBC performance m...

An important problem in multiresolution analysis of signals or images consists in estimating hidden random variables x 1⁄4 fxsgs2S from observed ones y 1⁄4 fysgs2S. This is done classically in the context of hidden Markov trees (HMT). HMT have been extended recently to the more general context of pairwise Markov trees (PMT). In this note, we propose an adaptive filtering algorithm which is an e...

To help understand the molecular mechanisms of Pasteurella multocida toxin (PMT) action, we searched for a cellular protein interacting with PMT. The ligand overlay assay revealed a 60-kDa cellular protein that binds to a region from the 840th to 985th amino acids of the toxin. This protein was identified as vimentin by peptide mass fingerprinting. The N-terminal head domain of vimentin was fur...

We are developing a Time-of-Flight Positron Emission Tomography detector using flat panel micro-channel plate photomultiplier tubes (MCP PMT). The high-speed waveform sampling data acquisition is adopted to exploit the fast time response of MCP PMT efficiently by using transmission-line readout scheme. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed detector, prototype detector modules were buil...

Four cDNAs for spermidine synthase (SPDS), which converts the diamine putrescine to the higher polyamine spermidine using decarboxylated S-adenosylmethionine as the co-factor, were isolated from Nicotiana sylvestris, Hyoscyamus niger, and Arabidopsis thaliana. When the N.sylvestris SPDS cDNA was expressed in a SPDS-deficient E. coli mutant, the recombinant protein showed high SPDS activity, but...