In guinea pigs, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from gram-negative bacteria and muramyl dipeptide (MDP) from gram-positive bacteria are potent inducers of systemic production of proinflammatory cytokines and fever. However, there is a striking difference between these two bacterial pyrogens in so far as repeated administration of LPS, but not of MDP, in short-term intervals induces tolerance by a prog...

BACKGROUND Sensing of muramyl dipeptide (MDP) is impaired in Crohn's disease (CD) patients with disease-linked variants of the CARD15 (caspase activation and recruitment domain 15) gene. Animal studies suggest that normal CARD15 signalling prevents inflammatory bowel disease, and may be important for disease development in CD. However, only a small fraction of CD patients carry the disease link...

BACKGROUND The localization of the additional canal orifice is one of the primary factors influencing the success of endodontic treatment. To deal with this problem, several techniques that each have their own advantages and disadvantages have been discussed in the literature. OBJECTIVES The aim of the present in vitro study was to review a new approach to localizing second mesiobuccal (MB2) ...

This paper presents a novel concept of multi-drop path-based multidestination message passing on switch-based irregular networks. First, the multi-drop mechanism is deened with an associated header encoding scheme, and this mechanism is used to develop path-based multidestination worms. Next, a method is proposed to identify valid multidestination paths on arbitrary irregular networks with a ty...

Reinforcement learning in nonstationary environments is generally regarded as an important and yet difficult problem. This paper partially addresses the problem by formalizing a subclass of nonsta-tionary environments. The environment model, called hidden-mode Markov decision process (HM-MDP), assumes that environmental changes are always confined to a small number of hidden modes. A mode basic...

This paper introduces the even odd POMDP an approxi mation to POMDPs Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems in which the world is assumed to be fully observable every other time step This approximation works well for problems with a delayed need to observe The even odd POMDP can be converted into an equivalent MDP the MDP whose value function V MDP can be combined online with a step loo...

In the service computing paradigm, a service broker can build new applications by composing network-accessible services offered by loosely coupled independent providers. In this paper, we address the problem of providing a service broker, which offers to prospective users a composite service with a range of different Quality of Service (QoS) classes, with a forward-looking admission control pol...

Despite plenty of effective antidepressant (AD) treatments, the outcome major depressive disorder (MDD) is often unsatisfactory, probably due to improvable exploitation available therapies. This European, cross-sectional, naturalistic multicenter study investigated frequency additional psychotherapy in terms a manual-driven (MDP) 1410 adult in- and outpatients with MDD, who were primarily treat...

Little information is available on the trends of adherence to the Mediterranean dietary pattern (MDP). This study investigates food consumption trends from 2010 to 2016 in subjects living in Northern Italy. A cross-sectional study of 8584 subjects enrolled between January 2010 and December 2016 was conducted. Socio-demographic, nutrition and lifestyle characteristics were collected. A 14-item q...

Previously, we showed that live Salmonella-containing phagosomes (LSP) recruit early acting Rab5 and promote fusion with early endosomes, thus avoiding transport to the lysosomes. Therefore, live Salmonella survive in a specialized compartment. Here we show that scavenger-receptor-mediated intracellular delivery of muramyl dipeptide (MDP) to macrophages leads to efficient killing of Salmonella ...