AIMS To assess the ability of human immunoglobulin Fc fragment binding activity to differentiate human biotype large colony group G streptococci from the group G "Streptococcus milleri group". METHODS Fifty two isolates of large colony group G streptococci and 30 group G "S milleri group" strains were tested for their ability to bind fluorescein conjugated human IgG Fc fragments after acetone...

Research in software testing has experienced a significant growth in recent years. One topic of special interest is fault detection techniques to reduce human interference and detect maximum faults. Priority is given to these techniques so that only higher priority techniques should be used instead of using individual techniques of lower priority. Bee Colony Optimization based upon natural phen...

BACKGROUND Following the release of the initial presentation of filgrastim (granulocyte colony-stimulating factor), several biosimilars have been developed worldwide. OBJECTIVE To study the efficacy of a Mexican biosimilar granulocyte colony-stimulating factor in a single transplant center. METHODS In a group of 19 consecutive patients with multiple sclerosis given autografts, we employed g...

In view of shortcomings of BP neural network, which is slow to converge and tends to trap in local optimum when applied in fault diagnosis, an approach for fault diagnosis based on BP neural network optimized by chaos ant colony algorithm is proposed. Mathematical model of chaos ant colony algorithm is created. Real-coded method is adopted and the weights and thresholds of BP neural network are...

Counting cells and colonies is an integral part of high-throughput screens and quantitative cellular assays. Due to its subjective and time-intensive nature, manual counting has hindered the adoption of cellular assays such as tumor spheroid formation in high-throughput screens. The objective of this study was to develop an automated method for quick and reliable counting of cells and colonies ...

Manual counting of bacterial colony forming units (CFUs) on agar plates is laborious and error-prone. We therefore implemented a colony counting system with a novel segmentation algorithm to discriminate bacterial colonies from blood and other agar plates.A colony counter hardware was designed and a novel segmentation algorithm was written in MATLAB. In brief, pre-processing with Top-Hat-filter...

Current bee population declines and colony failures are well documented yet poorly understood and no single factor has been identified as a leading cause. The evidence is equivocal and puzzling: for instance, many pathogens and parasites can be found in both failing and surviving colonies and field pesticide exposure is typically sublethal. Here, we investigate how these results can be due to s...

The top-view, two-dimensional spatial patterning of non-uniform growth in a Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast colony is considered. Experimental images are processed to obtain data sets that provide spatial information on the cell-area that is occupied by the colony. A method is developed that allows for the analysis of the spatial distribution with three metrics. The growth of the colony is quant...