Streptococcal pyrogenic exotoxin B (SPE B) is a cysteine protease produced by Streptococcus pyogenes. In this study, the differences in virulence between protease-positive clinical isolates and their protease-negative mutants were examined in a mouse model. Isogenic protease-negative mutants were constructed by homologous recombination, using integrational plasmids to disrupt the speB gene. The...

We assessed the combined use of serum protein electrophoresis (SPE) and nephelometric measurement of immunoglobulin heavy- and light-chain components for detecting serum monoclonal immunoglobulins (monoclonal components, MC) in 4788 unselected samples from 4173 patients. MC were detected in 514 samples from 390 patients. In 356 these were detected by SPE; the other 34 had a normal SPE pattern b...

The application of carbon nanotubes (CNT’s) for solid phase extraction (SPE) is still capturing the creative minds of the analytical chemists. This resulted in development of many modified procedures for difficult samples with improved analytical figures of merit. This review covers the most recent uses of CNT’s for SPE (up to December 31, 2009) that has not been covered in previous reviews. It...

In recent years, combinatorial methods have attracted a great deal of attention. Among them, sono-combining techniques have shown a significant potential as an economic technology applicable and environment-friendly technology for wastewater treatment. In this study, Sono Electrochemical SE, Sono Photo Electrochemical SPE and Sono Photo Electro Catalytic SPEC techniques were investigated for de...

A high sensitive electrochemical nanostructure sensor based on graphene oxide/Fe3O4@SiO2 nanocomposite modified graphite screen printed electrode (GO/Fe3O4@SiO2/SPE) has been developed for trace analysis of acetaminophen. The electrochemical study of the modified electrode, as well as its efficiency for simultaneous voltammetric oxidation of acetaminophen and tryptophan is described. Compared w...

We study n-player turn-based games played on a finite directed graph. For each play, the players have to pay a cost that they want to minimize. Instead of the well-known notion of Nash equilibrium (NE), we focus on the notion of subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE), a refinement of NE well-suited in the framework of games played on graphs. We also study natural variants of SPE, named weak (resp. v...

The potential of solid phase extraction (SPE) clean-up has been assessed to reduce matrix effects (signal suppression or enhancement) in the liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis of lipophilic marine toxins. A large array of ion-exchange, silica-based, and mixed-function SPE sorbents was tested. Polymeric sorbents were found to retain most of the toxins. Optimizatio...

A simple strategy for determination of hydroxylamine based on Fe3O4 nanoparticles function­nalized by [2-(4-((3-(trimethoxysilyl)propylthio)methyl)1-H1,2,3-triazol-1-yl)acetic­acid] (FNPs) and graphene oxide (GO) modified screen-printed electrode (SPE), denoted as (Fe3O4 FNPs/GO/SPE), is reported. The electrochemical behavior was investigated at Fe3O4FNPs/GO/SPE cyclic voltammetry (CV), differe...