BACKGROUND This paper aims to examine determinants of multiple sexual partnerships (MSPs) among South African men and women using a nationally representative sample. METHODS Quantitative and qualitative data from a 2008 population-based cross-sectional survey were used. The analysis focused on the 6990 (33.6% of total sample) who were 15 years and older and reported sexual activity in the pri...

Background: A conserved biological feature of sexual reproduction in animals is that oocytes arrest in meiotic prophase and resume meiosis in response to extraovarian signals. In C. elegans, sperm trigger meiotic resumption by means of the major sperm protein (MSP) signal. MSP promotes meiotic resumption by functioning as an ephrin-signaling antagonist and by counteracting inhibitory inputs fro...

We consider both information-theoretic and cryptographic settings for Multi-Party Computation (MPC), based on the underlying linear secret sharing scheme. Our goal is to study the Monotone Span Program (MSP), that is the result of local multiplication of shares distributed by two given MSPs as well as the access structure that this resulting MSP computes. First, we expand the construction propo...

Pseudotumour is a benign inflammatory lesion. Mycobacterial spindle cell pseudotumour (MSP) is a rare pseudotumour. It is a benign proliferation of spindle-shaped histiocytes containing acid-fast mycobacterium, commonly reported in immunocompromised patients. MSP is usually associated with mycobacterium avium complex (MAC). Here, we present the case of a 38-year-old gentleman with acquired immu...

Using extensive HST imaging, combined with Chandra X-ray and Parkes radio data, we have detected the optical binary companion to a second millisecond pulsar (MSP) in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. This faint (V = 22.3) blue (V − I = 0.7) star shows a large amplitude (60–70%) sinusoidal variation in both V and I. The period (3.19066 hr) and phase of the variation match those of the MSP 47 Tuc ...

Regulation of macrophage activities in response to inflammatory stimuli must be finely tuned to promote an effective immune response while, at the same time, preventing damage to the host. Our lab and others have previously shown that macrophage-stimulating protein (MSP), through activation of its receptor RON, negatively regulates NO production in response to IFN-gamma and LPS by inhibiting th...

We describe here a strategy for preparing a human membrane and secreted protein (MSP)-enriched cDNA library based on human MSP- and non-MSP-encoding cDNA sequences in the databases. The signal peptide parts of the MSP-encoding cDNA sequences, which currently comprise about half of the estimated total number in humans, were analyzed for common patterns. These patterns form a 'minimal' set of pol...

Let R be a finite set of terminals in a metric space (M,d). We consider finding a minimum size set S ⊆ M of additional points such that the unit-disc graph G[R ∪ S] of R ∪ S satisfies some connectivity properties. In the Steiner Tree with Minimum Number of Steiner Points (ST-MSP) problem G[R ∪ S] should be connected. In the more general Steiner Forest with Minimum Number of Steiner Points (SF-M...

The melanoma antigen gene (MAGE) A1-A6 RT-PCR system was developed for the detection of lung cancer cells in the sputum. However, we identified MAGE expression in some patients with non-malignant lung diseases. To understand these patterns of MAGE expression, we performed MAGE A3 methylation-specific PCR (MSP) and p16 MSP. We collected 24 biopsy s...

Antibodies capable of inhibiting the invasion of Plasmodium merozoites into erythrocytes are present in individuals that are clinically immune to the malaria parasite. Those targeting the 19-kD COOH-terminal domain of the major merozoite surface protein (MSP)-119 are a major component of this inhibitory activity. However, it has been difficult to assess the overall relevance of such antibodies ...