A new family of adenylyltransferases, defined by the presence of a Fic domain, was recently discovered to catalyze the addition of adenosine mono-phosphate (AMP) to Rho GTPases (Yarbrough et al., 2009, Science, 323:269; Worby et al., 2009, Mol. Cell, 34:93). This adenylylation event inactivates Rho GTPases by preventing them from binding to their downstream effectors. We reported that the Fic d...

The relationship between hypertension, ferritin-antiferritin mesangial immune injury (FIC), and progressive glomerular damage was studied in hypertensive (8% NaCl chow) Dahl salt-sensitive rats (DS) and in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). The glomeruli of SHR are protected from the increased perfusion pressure that accompanies systemic hypertension by preglomerular vasoconstriction, while...

PURPOSE We documented the uncoupling of sympathetic nervous system activity from the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in cats with feline interstitial cystitis (FIC). Altered hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal activity was recently suggested in some humans with interstitial cystitis (IC) but to our knowledge no information exists on adrenal gland size and histopathology in this disease. To inves...

The FIC is one of our attempts towards the design of robust fractal image compression. The main disadvantage of FIC is the high computational cost. To overcome this drawback, the technique described here utilizes the optimization techniques, like GA, ACO and PSO which greatly decreases the search space for finding the self similarities in the given image. FIC is robust against outliers in the i...

In recent years fractal image compression (FIC) have gained more interest because of their capability to achieve high compression ratios while maintaining very good quality of the reconstructed image. Many encoding method were proposed to reduce the encoding time, but coefficient quantization in FIC was proposed little. In this paper, we discuss the coefficient quantization in FIC and the param...

OBJECTIVE Acinetobacter baumannii species cause nosocomial infections and can subsequently develop multidrug resistance (MDR). The objective of this study was to evaluate the susceptibility of A. baumannii to a novel combination of colistin and tigecycline, which may provide a faster and more efficacious treatment via a synergistic effect. METHODS We included 50 MDR A. baumannii samples that ...

We investigated the in vitro interaction of terbinafine with itraconazole, fluconazole, amphotericin B and 5-flucytosine, against Aspergillus spp. We tested three isolates of Aspergillus fumigatus (one resistant to itraconazole), and two each of Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus terreus. We employed a broth microdilution-based method derived from an in vivo validated method ...

BACKGROUND Fentanyl-induced cough (FIC) is a transient condition with a reported incidence of 18% to 65% depending on the dose and route of administration of fentanyl. Nonpharmacological methods to prevent FIC are more cost-effective than medications. Dilution of fentanyl has a proven role in the prevention of FIC. Acupressure can also prevent FIC because it has a proven role in the treatment o...

Fentanyl-induced cough (FIC) is unwanted in the patients requiring stable induction of general anesthesia. This study was designed to evaluate the suppressive effects of butorphanol pretreatment on the incidence and severity of FIC during the induction of general anesthesia. A total of 315 patients of American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status I and II, scheduled for elective surgery...

This paper proposes a method to improve the performance of Fractal lmage Compression (FIC) technique by combining FIC (lossy compression) and another lossless method (in this case Huffman coding is used). This proposed method takes advantage on each techniques, the high compression ratio that can be provided by FIC and the infinite peak-to-peak signal to-noise ratio (PSNR) that can be provided ...