Group A Streptococcus (Streptococcus pyogenes or GAS) causes pharyngitis, severe invasive infections, and the post-infectious syndromes of glomerulonephritis and rheumatic fever. GAS can be internalized and killed by epithelial cells in vitro, a process that may contribute to local innate defense against pharyngeal infection. Secretion of the pore-forming toxin streptolysin O (SLO) by GAS has b...

While a great portion of the scheduling literature focuses on time-based criteria, the most important goal of management is maximizing the profitability of the firm. In this paper, the net preset value criterion is studied taking account of linear time-dependent cash flows in single machine and flow shop scheduling problems. First, a heuristic method is presented for the single machine scheduli...

The notion of social licence to operate (SLO) has become a widely applied concept for companies in mining and resource extraction industries manage their community relations, the face local criticism opposition. SLO literature practice have highlighted earning trust as key requirement an SLO. This article addresses three weaknesses how current trust. arguments are illustrated via examples from ...

in this paper, a stochastic cell formation problem is studied using queuing theory framework and considering reliability. since cell formation problem is np-hard, two algorithms based on genetic and modified particle swarm optimization (mpso) algorithms are developed to solve the problem. for generating initial solutions in these algorithms, a new heuristic method is developed, which always cre...

PURPOSE To evaluate the changes in visual acuity (VA) and in macular sensitivity in myopic eyes subjected to laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) refractive surgery. METHODS In 38 myopic eyes, VA by Snellen's table and macular sensitivity by scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO) microperimetry were assessed before and after 24 weeks after LASIK surgery. The myopic eyes were divided into three a...

The effect of the bacterial cytolytic toxin, streptolysin O (SLO), on rabbit erythrocyte membranes, liposomes, and lipid dispersions was examined. SLO produced no gross alterations in the major erythrocyte membrane proteins or lipids. However, when erythrocytes were treated with SLO and examined by electron microscopy, rings and "C"-shaped structures were observed in the cell membrane. The ring...

Meta-heuristic algorithms inspired by the natural processes are part of the optimization algorithms that they have been considered in recent years, such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, Firefly algorithm. Recently, a new kind of evolutionary algorithm has been proposed that it is inspired by the human sociopolitical evolution process. This new algorith...

This paper proposes a new mixed-integer model for the multi-skill resource-constrained project scheduling problem (MSRCPSP). The interactions between workers are represented as undirected networks. Therefore, for each required skill, an undirected network is formed which shows the relations of human resources. In this paper, community detection in networks is used to find the most compatible wo...

Although the toxicity of streptolysin O (SLO) and streptolysin S (SLS) in purified group A streptococci (GAS) has been established, the effect of these molecules in natural infection is not well understood. To identify whether biologically relevant concentrations of SLO and SLS were cytotoxic to epithelial and phagocytic cells that the bacteria would typically encounter during human infection a...