Hepatitis B is one of the most common infectious diseases, which leads to public health problems in the world, especially in Asian counties. In recent years, extensive human genetic association studies have been carried out to identify susceptible genes and genetic polymorphisms to understand the genetic contributions to the disease progression of HBV infection. HLA-DQ gene variations have been...

AIM To study the predictive value of a developmental assessment at 2 years corrected age (CA) for schooling at age 8 in children born very preterm and free of disability or delay; to identify other factors associated with schooling in this population. METHODS 244 children born before 33 weeks in 1997, part of the population-based EPIPAGE cohort study, free of disability or delay, had their de...

Address correspondence to: Cristina Palacios, PhD, Nutrition Program, Graduate School of Public Health, PO Box 365067, San Juan, PR 00936-5067. Email: cristina. [email protected] Objective: To explore the association of social-environment (SE) factors and diet quality (DQ) with weight status in a group of children in Puerto Rico (PR). Methods: A cross-sectional study in a sample of 114 12-year-o...

We prove a tight lower bound on the asymptotic performance ratio ρ of the bounded space online d-hypercube bin packing problem, solving an open question raised in 2005. In the classic d-hypercube bin packing problem, we are given a sequence of d-dimensional hypercubes and we have an unlimited number of bins, each of which is a d-dimensional unit hypercube. The goal is to pack (orthogonally) the...

It has been recognized that most fractals K in nature are actually composed of an in nite set of interwoven subfractals This structure becomes apparent when a particular measure of total mass supported by K is considered To every singularity exponent belongs a set C of all points of K for which the measure of the balls with radius roughly scales as for These sets are usually fractals giving the...

In this case report, we have found what may be an immunization with donor-specific human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DQα in combination with recipient-specific HLA-DQβ. A renal allograft recipient who did not comply with immunosuppressive therapy during pregnancy had graft failure 23 months posttransplantation with biopsy-proven humoral and cellular rejection. Sera were tested in a Luminex-based si...

A high-affinity polypeptide conjugate 4-C25L22-DQ, has been developed for the molecular recognition of the human C-reactive protein, CRP, a well-known inflammation biomarker. CRP is one of the most frequently quantified targets in diagnostic applications and a target in drug development. With the exception of antibodies, most molecular constructs take advantage of the known affinity for CRP of ...

Recently, it was found experimentally that the transverse momentum distribution of Drell-Yan pair in hadron-nucleus collisions shows nuclear dependence not linearly proportional to A, the atomic number of the target [1]. In addition, the average of squared transverse momentum, 〈q T 〉, grows approximately as A 1/3 [1,2]. This observed non-linear nuclear dependence indicates that multiple-scatter...

Let σ and ρ be finite or co-finite subsets of natural numbers. A subset of vertices S of a graph G = (V,E) is a (σ, ρ) -set of G if ∀v ∈ V : |N(v) ∩ S| ∈  σ if v ∈ S ρ if v ∈ V \ S A degree constraint matrix Dq is a q by q matrix with entries being finite or co-finite subsets of natural numbers. A Dq -partition in a graph G = (V,E) is a partition V1, V2, ..., Vq of V such that for 1 ≤ i, j ≤ q...

HLA-DQ alleles are closely associated with susceptibility and resistance to insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) but the immunologic mechanisms involved are not understood. Structural studies of the IDDM-susceptible allele, HLA-DQA1*0301/DQB1*0302, have classified it as a relatively unstable dimer, particularly at neutral pH. This is reminiscent of studies in the nonobese diabetic mouse, ...