OBJECTIVES The naturally occurring polyphenol (-)-epicatechin gallate (ECg) increases oxacillin susceptibility in mecA-containing strains of Staphylococcus aureus. Decreased susceptibility to lysostaphin suggests alterations to the wall teichoic acid (WTA) content of ECg-grown bacteria. Changes in WTA structure in response to ECg were determined. METHODS Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscop...

Skin-colonizing gram-positive bacteria produce wall teichoic acids (WTAs) or related glycopolymers for unclear reasons. Using a WTA-deficient Staphylococcus aureus mutant, we demonstrated that WTA confers resistance to antimicrobial fatty acids from human sebaceous glands by preventing fatty acid binding. Thus, WTA is probably important for bacterial skin colonization.

Listeria monocytogenes is an opportunistic Gram-positive bacterial pathogen responsible for listeriosis, a human foodborne disease. Its cell wall is densely decorated with wall teichoic acids (WTAs), a class of anionic glycopolymers that play key roles in bacterial physiology, including protection against the activity of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). In other Gram-positive pathogens, WTA modif...

A CMOS Current/Voltage mode winner-take-all circuit (WTA) with spatial filtering for image processing applications is presented. This WTA circuit has a unique ability of spatial filtering that allows removal of the background from the image and is suitable for integration with CMOS Active Pixel Sensors. In this circuit, image intensity has been chosen for the input saliency map. The removal pro...

In this paper, we propose a fast winner-take-all (WTA) neural network. The fast winner-take-all neural network with the dynamic ratio in mutual-inhibition is developed from the general mean-based neural network (GEMNET), which adopts the mean of the active neurons as the threshold of mutual inhibition. Furthermore, the other winner-take-all neural network enhances the convergence speed to becom...

The Weapon Target Assignment (WTA) problem is a fundamental defense application of operations research. The problem consists of optimally assigning a given number of weapons to a set of targets so that the post-engagement total expected survival value of the targets is minimized. Since the WTA problem is known to be NP-complete, there are no exact methods to solve it. This paper presents two in...

BACKGROUND The economic value attributed by users of health services in public health systems can be useful in planning and evaluation. This value can differ from the perspectives of Willingness to Pay (WTP) and Willingness to Accept [Compensation] (WTA).Our objective was to study the perceptions of the patient about the service provided by the family physician by means of the WTA/WTP ratio. ...

This paper presents two k-winners-take-all (k-WTA) networks with discontinuous activation functions. The k-WTA operation is first converted equivalently into linear and quadratic programming problems. Then two k-winners-take-all networks are designed based on the linear and quadratic programming formulations. The networks are theoretically guaranteed to be capable of performing the k-WTA operat...

Three measures of the value of time - willingness to pay (WTP) for a reduction in travel time, willingness to accept (WTA) a monetary compensation to forgo it, and the wage rate - are evaluated and compared. WTP and WTA were estimated from the two-part regressions of time price, using contingent valuation methods with primary survey data. Systematic differences are found in comparisons of WTP a...