The purpose of this study was to determine whether the in vitro activity and concentration of Streptococcus pneumoniae pneumolysin correlated to the pathogenesis of S. pneumoniae endophthalmitis. Five S. pneumoniae clinical endophthalmitis strains were grown in media to similar optical densities (OD), and extracellular milieu was tested for pneumolysin activity by hemolysis of rabbit red blood ...

The spring-loaded model stipulates that influenza virus infection is coupled to the transition of the virus hemagglutinin (HA) from a metastable conformation to a highly stable conformation at low pH. The properties of retrovirus envelope glycoproteins indicate that infection is coupled to an analogous conformational change. As a test of this hypothesis, the requirements for avian leukosis viru...

A number of theories have been developed to characterize ALogTime (or uniform NC, or just NC), the class of languages accepted by alternating logtime Turing machines, in the same way that Buss’s theory S12 characterizes polytime functions. Among these, ALV ′ (by Clote) is particularly interesting because it is developed based on Barrington’s theorem that the word problem for the permutation gro...

PIWI-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) protect the germ line by targeting transposable elements (TEs) through the base-pair complementarity. We do not know how piRNAs co-evolve with TEs in chickens. Here we reported that all active TEs in the chicken germ line are targeted by piRNAs, and as TEs lose their activity, the corresponding piRNAs erode away. We observed de novo piRNA birth as host responds to...

Gross lesions characterized by swollen livers and spleens accompanied by diffuse white miliary spots, which resembled those of Marek's disease, were detected in two flocks of local meat-type chickens at a Japanese poultry processing plant in June and August 2010. The microscopic examinations revealed proliferative foci consisting of spindle or polymorphic cells in the interstitium of livers, sp...

Avian leukosis virus (ALV)-induced osteopetrosis is associated with the accumulation of unintegrated viral DNA in osteoblasts. Viruses constructed from the DNAs of an osteopetrosis-inducing ALV (Br21) and a non-osteopetrosis-inducing ALV (RAV-0) have been used to test for the role of viral genes in the induction of osteopetrosis. Our results map osteopetrotic potential to a 1,400-base-pair regi...

An incremental learning by navigation approach to vision based autonomous land vehicle (ALV) guidance in indoor environments is proposed. The approach consists of three stages: initial learning, navigation, and model updating. In the initial learning stage, the ALV is driven manually, and environment images and other status data are recorded automatically. Then, an offline procedure is performe...

All currently licensed yellow fever (YF) vaccines are propagated in chicken embryos. Recent studies of chick cell-derived measles and mumps vaccines show evidence of two types of retrovirus particles, the endogenous avian retrovirus (EAV) and the endogenous avian leukosis virus (ALV-E), which originate from the chicken embryonic fibroblast substrates. In this study, we investigated substrate-de...

Although it is most often applied to finite state models, in recent years, symbolic model checking has been extended to infinite state models using symbolic representations that encode infinite sets. This paper investigates the application of an infinite state symbolic model checker called Action Language Verifier (ALV) to formal requirements specifications of safety-critical systems represente...

At 45 wk of age, 99 roosters housed in individual cages were tested for avian leukosis-J strain virus (ALV-J); 32 tested positive and 67 tested negative. These roosters were fed a restricted diet to maintain weight to primary breeder specifications. Individual semen and ceca samples were analyzed for presence and level of Campylobacter. Population levels of Campylobacter in semen and ceca of AL...