BACKGROUND Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the principal etiologic agent of human tuberculosis (TB) and a member of the M. tuberculosis complex (MTC). Additional MTC species that cause TB in humans and other mammals include Mycobacterium africanum and Mycobacterium bovis. One result of studies interrogating recently identified MTC phylogenetic markers has been the recognition of at least two dist...

We present the first comprehensive analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates circulating in the Kaohsiung region of southern Taiwan. The major spoligotypes found in the 224 isolates studied were Beijing lineages (n = 97; 43.3%), EAI lineages (n = 72; 32.1%) and Haarlem lineages (n = 18; 8.0%). By 24 MIRU-VNTR typing, 174 patterns were identified, including 24 clusters of 74 isolates and 1...

In the article we settle down the problem of permanence of property RD under group extensions. We show that if 1 → N → G → Q → 1 is a short exact sequence of compactly generated groups such that Q has property RD, and N has property RD with respect to the restriction of a word-length on G, then G has property RD. We also generalize the result of Ji and Schweitzer stating that locally compact gr...

It can be impossible to identify compatible platelet donors for alloimmunized patients whose HLA type cannot be determined or who have uncommon HLA types. We have previously shown that histocompatible donors can be rapidly identified by "mass screening" of platelet concentrates (PC), which are readily available in all blood banks, using a solid-phase adherence platelet cross-matching technique....

Panax ginseng is a famous herbal medicine widely used in Asia. Ginsenosides have been identified as the principle active ingredients for Panax ginseng's biological activity, among which ginsenoside Rd (Rd) attracts extensive attention for its obvious neuroprotective activities. Here we investigated the effect of Rd on neurite outgrowth, a crucial process associated with neuronal repair. PC12 ce...

Let (Wt)0≤t≤1 be an r-dimensional Wiener process defined on a probability space (Ω, , P) and let ( t)0≤t≤1 denote the natural filtration of (Wt) such that 0 contains all P-null sets of . Let ξ be an 1-measurable d-dimensional square-integrable random variable. Let f be an Rd-valued process defined on R+ ×Ω×Rd ×Rd×r with values in Rd such that for all (y,z) ∈ Rd ×Rd×r , the map (t,ω) → f (t,ω, y...