Bacteria secrete enzymes into the extracellular space to hydrolyze macromolecules into constituents that can be imported for microbial nutrition. In bacterial communities, these enzymes and their resultant products can be modeled as community property. Our goal was to investigate the impact of individual community member absence on the resulting community production of exoenzymes (extracellular...

Interstitial fibrosis is one of the most deleterious events during the progression of renal deterioration after renal mass reduction. In vivo, hydroxymethylglutaryl CoA reductase inhibitors (HRI) were shown to reduce progression of glomerulosclerosis, but the mechanisms are still unclear. The present study investigates, in vivo, whether lovastatin, a potent HRI, was able to modulate the plasmin...

In contrast to most Staphylococcus aureus isolates in which the gene for staphylococcal beta-lactamase (blaZ) is plasmid borne, isolates typeable by group II bacteriophages frequently carry blaZ on the chromosome. Furthermore, the chromosomal gene encodes the type B variant of staphylococcal beta-lactamase for which the nucleotide and deduced amino acid sequences have not yet been reported. To ...

PURPOSE To understand the involvement of isoprenylated small guanosine triphosphatases (GTPases) in lovastatin-induced cataractogenesis, Rho- and Rac-mediated cell adhesion and actin cytoskeletal reorganization were investigated in lovastatin-treated lens epithelial cells. METHODS The effects of lovastatin on F-actin reorganization (phalloidin staining), focal adhesion formation (paxillin or ...

When visual sensor networks (VSNs) enter daily life in society, they not only bring great convenience but also cause people to worry about privacy. Traditional image encryption often displays the effect of snowflake encrypted images playing a part privacy protection, usability directly browsing taken by nodes VSNs is sacrificed. Recently, thumbnail-preserving (TPE) has been proposed balance and...

—Recently the developments of Ubiquitous Computing and Augmented Reality technologies have made many changes on the existing applications. However, the contents used in the applications have been not revised conceptually. Thus, an expansive representation of the contents is required to adapt resources to new computing environments, and to reflect new emerging features such as realism, mobility ...