The mechanism of protection of type-specific antipneumococcal antibody and complement in bacteremia was investigated with purified rabbit antibody and a guinea pig model of pneumococcal bacteremia. IgG and IgM were isolated from the sera of rabbits immunized with type 7 pneumococci (Pn), and their binding to Pn was quantitated. The number of antibody-binding sites on the pnuemococcal capsule wa...

BACKGROUND The optimal route of nutrition in severe pancreatitis is controversial. Parenteral nutrition (PN) is preferred, but enteral nutrition (EN) promises to attenuate inflammation and prevent sepsis. We hypothesized that EN was at least equivalent to PN in reducing inflammation, providing effective nutrition and being cost-effective. METHODS We conducted a randomized controlled trial com...

A multipatch model is proposed to study the impact of travel on the spatial spread of disease between patches with different level of disease prevalence. The basic reproduction number for the ith patch in isolation is obtained along with the basic reproduction number of the system of patches, Re(0). Inequalities describing the relationship between these numbers are also given. For a two-patch m...

We propose here a grammatical evolution approach for the automatic discovery of Petri net models of biochemical systems that are consistent with population level genetic models of disease susceptibility. We demonstrate the grammatical evolution approach routinely identifies interesting and useful Petri net models in a human-competitive manner. This study opens the door for hierarchical systems ...

The size-Ramsey number R̂(F ) of a graph F is the smallest integer m such that there exists a graph G on m edges with the property that any colouring of the edges of G with two colours yields a monochromatic copy of F . In this paper, first we focus on the size-Ramsey number of a path Pn on n vertices. In particular, we show that 5n/2 − 15/2 ≤ R̂(Pn) ≤ 74n for n sufficiently large. (The upper bou...

This note considers the problem how zeros lying on the boundary of a domain influence the norm of polynomials (under the normalization that their value is fixed at a point). It is shown that k zeros raise the norm by a factor (1 + ck/n) (where n is the degree of the polynomial), while k excessive zeros on an arc compared to n times the equilibrium measure raise the norm by a factor exp(ck/n). T...

The Symmetric Traveling Salesman Polytope Sn for a fixed number n of cities is a face of the corresponding Graphical Traveling Salesman Polyhedron Pn. This has been used to study facets of Sn using Pn as a tool. In this paper, we study the operation of “rotating” (or “lifting”) valid inequalities for Sn to obtain a valid inequalities for Pn. As an application, we describe a surprising relations...

Let Pn be the order determined by taking a random graph G on {l,2,...,n}, directing the edges from the lesser vertex to the greater (as integers), and then taking the transitive closure of this relation. We call such an ordered set a random graph order. We show that there exist constants c, and a, such that the expected height and set up number of Pn are sharply concentrated around en and cm re...