Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is bacterial cell wall component capable of inducing osteoclast formation and pathological bone resorption. Muramyl dipeptide (MDP), the minimal essential structural unit responsible for the immunological activity of peptidoglycans, is ubiquitously expressed by bacterium. In this study, we investigated the effect of MDP in LPS-induced osteoclast formation and bone resor...

Recently, some studies have utilized the Markov Decision Process for diversifying (MDP-DIV) the search results in information retrieval. Though promising performances can be delivered, MDP-DIV suffers from a very slow convergence, which hinders its usability in real applications. In this paper, we aim to promote the performance of MDPDIV by speeding up the convergence rate without much accuracy...

Construction and screening of DNA libraries for genes of interest represent the standard but tedious cloning procedures (1). The advent of PCR technology has greatly enhanced the efficiency of traditional gene isolation and cloning techniques. Various strategies have been developed for PCR amplification of an unknown DNA fragment that flanks one end of a known sequence which include inverse PCR...

Studies were carried out to determine whether treatment of mice with the synthetic adjuvant muramyl dipeptide (MDP) afforded any resistance to infection with Listeria monocytogenes. Regardless of the timing, dose, or route of administration, there was no evidence that treatment with either MDP or two of its analogs (des-MDP or MDP-D-D) induced any resistance to listeria infection in BALB/c, CBA...

AIM The aim of this study was to evaluate the antibacterial effects of different one-step and two-step self-etching primer/adhesives on Streptococcus mutans (S. mutans), Lactobacillus casei (L. casei), and Lactobacillus acidophilus (L. acidophilus). METHODS AND MATERIALS The antibacterial effects of Clearfil Protect Bond Primer and Bonding agent; AdheSE Primer and Bonding agent; Adper Prompt ...

A new translation from Partially Observable MDP into Fully Observable MDP is described here. Unlike the classical translation, the resulting problem state space is finite, making MDP solvers able to solve this simplified version of the initial partially observable problem: this approach encodes agent beliefs with fuzzy measures over states, leading to an MDP whose state space is a finite set of...

Many of the Ags recognized by human melanoma-reactive CTL are derived from proteins that are also expressed in melanocytes. The possibility of self-tolerance to these epitopes has led to questions about their utility for antitumor immunotherapy. To investigate the issue, we established a preclinical model based on transgenic mice expressing a recombinant HLA-A*0201 molecule and B16 melanoma tra...

The miscibility behavior in blends containing poly(4-vinyl pyridine) (P4VPy) and poly(2-vinyl pyridine) (P2VPy) as polymer components and the dihydric phenols 4,4’-thiodiphenol (TDP) and 4,4’-methylendiphenol (MDP) as low molecular weight compounds (LMWC), was studied by Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometry (FTIR) as main analytical techniques...

6-O-acyl-muramyldipeptides (MDP) with various lengths of fatty acid chains were examined for their dendritic cell (DC) maturation activity expressed through TLRs. Judging from anti-TLR mAb/inhibitor-blocking analysis, MDP derivatives with a single octanoyl or stearoyl fatty acid chain were found to activate TLR2 and TLR4 on human DCs, although intact and diacylated MDP expressed no ability to a...

Characterization of synthetic oligonucleotides and quantification of primer extension mediated by a human translesion synthesis polymerase η (Pol η) over drug-induced DNA lesions in the presence on modified nucleotide analogs is described. Extent of primer extension for each reaction was monitored by denaturing gel electrophoresis. The data was obtained to assess the performance of the fluoresc...