Our previous studies have shown that the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) strain Mie/40/2004 is the most virulent of the strains isolated by us in Japan from 2002 to 2004. Comparison of the amino acid sequence of Mie/40/2004 with those of low-virulence strains revealed that an isoleucine residue at position 3 of the Mie/40/2004 NS4A protein may increase viral pathogenicity. A recombinant virus...

Background. Minimally invasive esophagectomy (MIE) techniques offer similar oncological and surgical outcomes to open methods. The effects of MIE on hospital costs are not well documented. Methods. We reviewed the electronic records of patients who underwent esophagectomy at a single academic institution between January 2012 and December 2014. Esophagectomy techniques were grouped into open, hy...

A microscopy system has been constructed that is capable of simultaneously acquiring both traditional Raman spectra as well as angle-resolved elastic-scattering patterns using a single focused laser spot less than 10 mum wide. The elastic-scattering signal was analyzed by generalized Lorenz-Mie theory, representing what we believe to be the first experimental validation of the theory's predicti...

The human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) major immediate-early (MIE) genes, encoding IE1 p72 and IE2 p86, are activated by a complex enhancer region (base positions -65 to -550) that operates in a cell type- and differentiation-dependent manner. The expression of MIE genes is required for HCMV replication. Previous studies analyzing functions of MIE promoter-enhancer segments suggest that the distal en...

Retrieval of size distributions from multispectral optical depth measurements requires solution of an illposed inverse problem. The illposedness causes problems such as solution ambiguity. Size distribution retrieval becomes more complicated in the presence of nonspherical particles and/or refractive index errors. A new retrieval algorithm is first developed that allows for both smoothing and n...

A recently developed portable instrument, the pulsed cavity ring-down transmissometer/nephelometer tandem (CRDT/N) allows for the in situ measurement of optical properties of aerosols. An Nd:YAG laser excited CRDT (λ = 532, 1064 nm) is shown to be capable of sensitively measuring the aerosol extinction coefficient (bext) at the two wavelengths simultaneously. Adding a nephelometer yields a meas...