Sera from non-infected cattle and cattle infected with Anaplasma, Babesia, Theileria and Sarcocystis were tested for antibodies to Besnoitia in ELISA and immunofluorescence tests (IFT) with Besnoitia besnoiti of blue wildebeest origin as antigen. Only 2 out of 86 sera gave false positive reactions in ELISA and none in the IFT, indicating a high specificity for the tests. Three-hundred-and-three...

Fc gamma receptor IIB (FcγRIIB) is the only Fc gamma receptor (FcγR) which negatively regulates the immune response, when engaged by antigen- (Ag-) antibody (Ab) complexes. Thus, the generation of Ag-specific IgG in response to infection or immunization has the potential to downmodulate immune protection against infection. Therefore, we sought to determine the impact of FcγRIIB on immune protec...

Non-linear image reconstruction and signal analysis deal with complex inverse problems. To tackle such problems in a systematic way, I present information field theory (IFT) as a means of Bayesian, data based inference on spatially distributed signal fields. IFT is a statistical field theory, which permits the construction of optimal signal recovery algorithms even for nonlinear and non-Gaussia...

If we’re lucky, we get old. Physical and mental decline are negative hallmark associations of aging. Imagine being born blind and, as you approach middle age, waking up with the ability to see. In this issue of PLOS Genetics, Cornils, Maurya, and colleagues discover such a phenomenon: age-related suppression of ciliogenesis defects [1]. Cilia are microtubule-based organelles that protrude from ...

The Image Foresting Transform (IFT) is a framework for image partitioning, commonly used for interactive segmentation. Given an image where a subset of the image elements (seed-points) have been assigned correct segmentation labels, the IFT completes the labeling by computing minimal cost paths from all image elements to the seed-points. Each image element is then given the same label as the cl...

To better understand the numerous solutions related to watershed transform (WT), this paper shows the relationships between some discrete de nitions of the WT: the watersheds based on image foresting transform (IFT), topographic distance (TD), local condition (LC), and minimum spanning forest (MSF). We demonstrate that the tie-zone (TZ) concept, that uni es the multiple solutions of a given WT,...

Formation of flagellar outer dynein arms in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii requires the ODA16 protein at a previously uncharacterized assembly step. Here, we show that dynein extracted from wild-type axonemes can rebind to oda16 axonemes in vitro, and dynein in oda16 cytoplasmic extracts can bind to docking sites on pf28 (oda) axonemes, which is consistent with a role for ODA16 in dynein transport, ...

Theories of human behavior are an important but largely untapped resource for software engineering research. They are important because lack of understanding of human software developers’ needs and activities can mean that important software engineering breakthroughs never get used outside the lab. Furthermore, theory abstracts beyond specific methods and tools to fundamental principles that ca...

The bacterial type rhodopsins are present in all the three domains of life. In contrast to the animal type rhodopsin that performs mainly sensory functions in higher eukaryotes, the bacterial type rhodopsin could function as ion channel, pumps and as sensory proteins. The functioning of rhodopsin in higher eukaryotes requires the transport of rhodopsin from its site of synthesis to the ciliated...