Introduction: Dabska tumor, or papillary intra-lymphatic angioendothelioma (PILA), first described in 1969 by Dabska, is a rare vascular low grade malignancy that usually affects the skin and subcutaneous tissues of infants. Case Report: We report a case of PILA of the right tongue in a 65 years old male patient presenting as a white-bluish multinodular lesion, measuring 4x3 cm. After wide exci...

Background: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen, is a common cause of healthcare-associated infections in immunocompromised individuals. The rapid emergence of multidrug-resistant strains has made P. aeruginosa infections progressively difficult to treat. In this study we evaluated the effect of a chimeric protein containing a P. aeruginosa PilQ fragment and the PilA disulfide loo...

Twitching motility is a form of surface-associated bacterial movement mediated by type IV pili of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Others have shown that pilT and pilU mutants, which are piliated but defective in twitching motility, display reduced cytotoxic capacity towards epithelial cells in vitro. Although these mutants efficiently infected lungs in vivo, they were defective in dissemination to the ...

We prove an analog of the Yomdin–Gromov lemma for p-adic definable sets and more broadly in a non-Archimedean definable context. This analog keeps track of piecewise approximation by Taylor polynomials, a nontrivial aspect in the totally disconnected case. We apply this result to bound the number of rational points of bounded height on the transcendental part of p-adic subanalytic sets, and to ...

Fruiting body formation of Myxococcus xanthus, like biofilm formation of many other organisms, involves the production of an extracellular matrix (ECM). While the polysaccharide component has been studied, the protein component has been largely unexplored. Proteins associated with the ECM were solubilized from purified ECM by boiling with sodium dodecyl sulfate and were identified by liquid chr...

We give an unconditional proof of the André-Oort conjecture for arbitrary products of modular curves. We establish two generalizations. The first includes the Manin-Mumford conjecture for arbitrary products of elliptic curves defined over Q as well as Lang’s conjecture for torsion points in powers of the multiplicative group. The second includes the Manin-Mumford conjecture for abelian varietie...

Pilin precursors are the building blocks of pili on the surface of Gram-positive bacteria; however, the assembly mechanisms of these adhesive fibers are unknown. Here, we describe the chemical bonds that assemble BcpA pilin subunits on the surface of Bacillus cereus. Sortase D cleaves BcpA precursor between the threonine (T) and the glycine (G) residues of its LPXTG sorting signal and catalyzes...

The antigenic structure of gonococcal pilin, strain MS11 (Tr), was investigated by assaying the binding of antisera engendered by intact pili from strains MS11 and R10 and their two major cyanogen bromide-generated fragments, CNBr-2 (residues 9-92) and CNBr-2 (residues 93-159), to synthetic peptides corresponding to the amino acid sequence of MS11 pilin. Four peptides were synthesized correspon...

Pili of pathogenic Neisseria are major virulence factors associated with adhesion, cytotoxicity, twitching motility, autoaggregation, and DNA transformation. Pili are modified posttranslationally by the addition of phosphorylcholine. However, no genes involved in either the biosynthesis or the transfer of phosphorylcholine in Neisseria meningitidis have been identified. In this study, we identi...

The structure of the N-terminal-truncated Type IVb structural pilin (t-PilS) from Salmonella typhi was determined by NMR. Although topologically similar to the recently determined x-ray structure of pilin from Vibrio cholerae toxin-coregulated pilus, the only Type IVb pilin with known structure, t-PilS contains many distinct structural features. The protein contains an extra pair of beta-strand...