Rhodococcus equi is a facultative intracellular, Gram-positive, soilborne actinomycete which can cause severe pyogranulomatous pneumonia with abscessation in young horses (foals) and in immunocompromised people, such as persons with AIDS. All strains of R. equi isolated from foals and approximately a third isolated from humans contain a large, ~81-kb plasmid which is essential for the intramacr...

The equine piroplasmosis caused by Theileria equi is one of the most important parasitic diseases of the equine, causing damage to animal health and economic losses. In T. equi, 2 merozoite surface proteins, equi merozoite antigen EMA-1 and EMA-2, have been identified as the most immunodominant antigens. This suggests that these antigens might be used as immunobiological tools. The EMA-1 of The...

The ability of Rhodococcus equi to induce pneumonia in foals depends on the presence of an 85- to 90-kb plasmid. In this study, we evaluated whether plasmid-encoded products mediate virulence by modulating the cytokine response of foals. Foals infected intrabronchially with a virulence plasmid-containing strain of R. equi had similar gamma interferon (IFN-gamma) and interleukin-12 (IL-12) p35 b...

Rhodococcus equi is one of the most important causes of disease in foals. Infection is typically characterized by pyogranulomatous pneumonia although extrapulmonary infections occur occasionally. Uveitis and polysynovitis have been reported in foals naturally infected with R. equi and are thought to be the result of an immune-mediated process. However, the pathogenesis of these conditions is po...

The amount of data generated and stored in cloud systems has been increasing exponentially. The examples of data include user generated data, machine generated data as well as data crawled from the Internet. There have been several frameworks with proven efficiency to store and process the petabyte scale data such as Apache Hadoop, HDFS and several NoSQL frameworks. These systems have been wide...

A fractal, as originally described by Mandelbrot, is a set with an irregular and fragmented shape. Many fractals that have been extensively studied, such as self-similar sets, have the same degree of irregularity and fragmentation at all length scales. In contrast to this, an equi-homogeneous set is an irregular and fragmented shape that at each fixed scale is identical at every point. We show ...

Aim: To isolate aerobic bacterial micro flora residing in the upper respiratory tract of equines used by the pilgrims and tourists in Jammu & Kashmir. Materials and Methods: 88 apparently healthy equines and 53 equines with respiratory tract diseases were used in this study. Swab samples were collected from the upper respiratory tract of equines. Isolation and identification of the bacteria was...

Little is known about the iron acquisition systems of the soilborne facultative intracellular pathogen Rhodococcus equi. We previously reported that expression of iupABC, encoding a putative siderophore ABC transporter system, is iron regulated and required for growth at low iron concentrations. Here we show that disruption of iupA leads to the concomitant accumulation of catecholates and a chr...