BACKGROUND Pretreatment nutritional and immunological statuses play an indispensable role in predicting the outcome of patients with various types of malignancies. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the predictive value of albumin/globulin ratio (AGR) in overall survival (OS) and recurrence in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) following radical hepatic carcinectomy. PATIENTS ...

The staphylococcal virulon is activated by the density-sensing agr system, which is autoinduced by a short peptide (autoinducing peptide [AIP]) processed from a propeptide encoded by agrD. A central segment of the agr locus, consisting of the C-terminal two-thirds of AgrB (the putative processing enzyme), AgrD, and the N-terminal half of AgrC (the receptor), shows striking interstrain variation...

The molecular characteristics of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolated from neonates in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) were investigated by multilocus sequence typing (MLST), staphylocoagulase (SC) genotyping, staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) typing, accessory gene regulator (agr) typing, and the presence of Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL). Among th...

In this retrospective analysis, we evaluated associations between albumin to globulin ratio (AGR), clinicopathological characteristics, and survival in 592 patients with localized or locally advanced clear cell renal cell carcinoma (CCRCC) prior to nephrectomy. We found that low AGR was associated with more aggressive tumor behavior; patients with low AGR had poorer overall survival (OS) and ca...

Staphylococcus aureus can cause numerous different diseases, which has been attributed to its large repertoire of virulence factors, many of which are under the control of the accessory gene regulator (agr) quorum sensing system. Under conditions of high cell density, agr increases the production of many virulence factors, decreases expression of several colonization factors, and is intimately ...

Most verification tools and methodologies such as model checking, equivalence checking, hardware verification, software verification, and hardware-software coverification often flatten out the behavior of a target system before verification. Inherent modularities, either explicit or implicit, functional or structural, are not exploited by these tools and algorithms. In this work, we show how as...

We used multiplex PCR to determine the agr group membership of 18 European glycopeptide heterointermediate and intermediate-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains. Of the 15 agr group I strains, 13 were resistant and 2 were susceptible to methicillin. The remaining three strains, like the United States and Japanese control strains, belonged to agr group II.

staphylococcus aureus is generally regarded as a leading cause of mastitis in dairy cattle. the aim of this study was to investigate the pattern of agr groups and any possible relationship between agr groups and antibiotic resistance among s. aureus strains isolated from bovine mastitis in northeast of iran. for this purpose, a total of 300 bovine mastitic milk samples were taken from dairy ind...