BACKGROUND Cognitive impairment and depression frequently co-occur in late life. There remains a need to better characterize psychosocial risk factors of cognitive decline in older adults with depression. We hypothesized that certain psychosocial factors would be associated with higher risk of cognitive decline in individuals with late-life depression. METHODS 130 individuals aged ≥ 65 years ...

A mannitol phosphotransferase system (PTS) was identified in Bacillus stearothermophilus by in vitro complementation with Escherichia coli EI, HPr, and IIA(Mtl). Degenerate primers based on regions of high amino acid similarity in the E. coli and Staphylococcus carnosus EII(Mt1) were used to develop a digoxigenin-labeled probe by PCR. Using this probe, we isolated three overlapping DNA fragment...

Under anaerobic conditions, Saccharomyces cerevisiae uses NADH-dependent glycerol-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (Gpd1p and Gpd2p) to re-oxidize excess NADH, yielding substantial amounts of glycerol. In a Deltagpd1 Deltagpd2 double-null mutant, the necessary NAD+ regeneration through glycerol production is no longer possible, and this mutant does not grow under anaerobic conditions. The excess NADH ...

This work is an extension of a recently developed software tool called MTLD (Multi-level Immune Learning Detection), which implements a negative selection algorithm for anomaly and fault detection that i s inspired by the human immune system. The immunity-based approach can detect a broad spectrum of known and unforeseen faults. We extend MILD by applying a neural network classifier to identify...

Sophisticated genetic tools to modify essential biological processes at the molecular level are pivotal in elucidating the molecular pathogenesis of Clostridium difficile, a major cause of healthcare associated disease. Here we have developed an efficient procedure for making precise alterations to the C. difficile genome by pyrE-based allelic exchange. The robustness and reliability of the met...

Procollagen C-endopeptidase (BMP-1) is one of two key enzymes crucial for conversion of fibrillar procollagens to self-assembling collagen monomers. Recently, we have reported inhibition of the largest variant of BMP-1, a recombinant mammalian tolloid (mTld) in vitro, on procollagen type I using peptides with amino acid sequences in chordin conserved across different species. Here, we tested th...