Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a ubiquitous, gram-negative marine bacterium that undergoes phase variation between opaque and translucent colony morphologies. The purpose of this study was to determine the factor(s) responsible for the opaque and translucent phenotypes and to examine cell organization within both colony types. Examination of thin sections of ruthenium red-stained bacterial cells by...

Phenotypic transitions play critical roles in host adaptation, virulence, and sexual reproduction in pathogenic fungi. A minority of natural isolates of Candida albicans, which are homozygous at the mating type locus (MTL, a/a or α/α), are known to be able to switch between two distinct cell types: white and opaque. It is puzzling that white-opaque switching has never been observed in the major...

The white-opaque switch is a bistable, epigenetic transition affecting multiple traits in Candida albicans including mating, immunogenicity, and niche specificity. To compare how the two cell states respond to external cues, we examined the fitness, phenotypic switching, and filamentation properties of white cells and opaque cells under 1,440 different conditions at 25°C and 37°C. We demonstrat...

Background and Aim: This study evaluated the effect of hydrothermal aging on opti-cal and mechanical properties of opaque and translucent zirconia. Materials and Methods: For the biaxial flexural strength (BFS) test, 40 sintered opaque and translucent disc-shaped zirconia, and for the assessment of surface rough-ness and optical properties, 20 specimens were fabricated and artificially aged in...

PURPOSE Thickness changes of corneal sub-layers after phacoemulsification were investigated by spectral domain ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography (UHR-OCT). METHODS The corneas (n = 26) of 26 age-related cataract surgery patients were studied. UHR-OCT was used to evaluate the thickness of Descemet's Endothelium Complex (DEC), stroma, Bowman's layer, epithelium, and full cornea...

Depending on the environmental conditions, the pathogenic yeast Candida albicans can undergo different developmental programs, which are controlled by dedicated transcription factors and upstream signaling pathways. C. albicans strains that are homozygous at the mating type locus can switch from the normal yeast form (white) to an elongated cell type (opaque), which is the mating-competent form...

The ability to switch between yeast and filamentous forms is central to Candida albicans biology. The yeast-hyphal transition is implicated in adherence, tissue invasion, biofilm formation, phagocyte escape, and pathogenesis. A second form of morphological plasticity in C. albicans involves epigenetic switching between white and opaque forms, and these two states exhibit marked differences in t...

In this paper, we propose an identities(ID) based watermarking scheme for Java programs. In our scheme, the watermark is generated by participants’ identities, embedded via the watermarked opaque predicates, and verified using zero-knowledge proof. We also present a construction of a family of opaque predicates by Legendre symbol, which is resilient, cheap, and stealthy. The order of the waterm...