Information processing of the thermoresponse in Escherichia coli was compared with that of the chemoresponse. Competition experiments between various chemical stimuli and the thermal stimulus showed that only L-serine was a potent inhibitor of the thermosensory transduction. The concentration of L-serine necessary for complete inhibition of the thermoresponse was about 0.1 mM. L-Serine at this ...

Campylobacter jejuni constitutes the leading cause of bacterial gastroenteritis in the United States and a major cause of diarrhoea worldwide. Little is known about virulence mechanisms in this organism because of the scarcity of suitable genetic tools. We have developed an efficient system of in vitro transposon mutagenesis using a mariner-based transposon and purified mariner transposase. Thr...

CO SM O S + TA X IS Bruce Caldwell’s observation that “[b]y the 1960s Hayek was seeing complex orders everywhere” is something that struck a cautionary note in our thinking about jazz (Caldwell 2000, p. 19). Indiscriminate use of the concept (known as “concept creep” in the psychology literature) would of course empty it of meaning, a fate that has befallen many a key term in social philosophy....

Three-bond (3)J(C'C') and (3)J(HNHα) couplings in peptides and proteins are functions of the intervening backbone torsion angle ϕ. In well-ordered regions, (3)J(HNHα) is tightly correlated with (3)J(C'C'), but the presence of large ϕ angle fluctuations differentially affects the two types of couplings. Assuming the ϕ angles follow a Gaussian distribution, the width of this distribution can be e...

An intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) lacks a stable three-dimensional structure, while it folds into a specific structure when it binds to a target molecule. In some IDP-target complexes, not all target binding surfaces are exposed on the outside, and intermediate states are observed in their binding processes. We consider that stepwise target recognition via intermediate states is a chara...

The world is changing rapidly. Yet a common assumption is that cars, buses and taxis will remain the dominant local passenger transport modes in the coming decades. This concept paper draws on literature sources and on discussions with industry stakeholders to look anew at the local passenger transport sector in the light of broader societal trends to suggest an alternative future, and to offer...

Historically, egg-bound reptile embryos were thought to passively thermoconform to the nest environment. However, recent observations of thermal taxis by embryos of multiple reptile species have led to the widely discussed hypothesis that embryos behaviorally thermoregulate. Because temperature affects development, such thermoregulation could allow embryos to control their fate far more than hi...

In this study, we assessed the development (formation, taxis and settlement) of eukaryotic zoospores under different regimes of exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which imitated environmental scenarios of pollution and bioremediation. With this aim, we used an oomycete, Pythium aphanidermatum, as a source of zoospores and two PAH-degrading bacteria (Mycobacterium gilvum VM552 ...

Current tuberculosis notification rates in South Africa are among the highest ever recorded. Although the human immunodeficiency virus epidemic has been a critical factor, the density of respiratory contacts in highrisk environments may be an important and underappreciated driver. Using a modified Wells-Riley model for airborne disease transmission, we estimated the risk of tuberculosis transmi...

Recommending suitable routes to taxi drivers for picking up passengers is helpful to raise their incomes and reduce the gasoline consumption. In this paper, a pick-up tree based route recommender system is proposed to minimize the traveling distance without carrying passengers for a given taxis set. Firstly, we apply clustering approach to the GPS trajectory data of a large number of taxis that...