Despite recent advances, tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains imperfect in resource-limited settings due to its complexity and costs, poor sensitivity of available tests, or long times to reporting. We present a report on the use of colorimetric methods, based on the detection of mycobacterial growth using colorimetric indicators, for the detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in sputum specime...

BACKGROUND NAFLD/NASH is a manifestation of metabolic syndrome and is associated with obesity/overweight. Not all obese/overweight individuals develop NASH. Gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD) is considered a gastrointestinal manifestation of the metabolic syndrome and is associated with obesity/overweight. Again not all obese/overweight individuals develop GERD. Recent data show associatio...

Abstract Older workers are increasingly being encouraged to work beyond normal retirement age (NRA). Given that employers generally control opportunities for employees NRA, better understanding their motivations, attitudes, and experiences in (re)hiring NRA is vital. To date, however, research investigating employment has primarily focused on the perspective of employees. In this study, we anal...

OBJECTIVES The reference standard methods for drug susceptibility testing (DST) of M. tuberculosis are very slow to give results, and due to the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, there is an urgent demand for new, rapid and accurate DST methods, particularly in low-income countries. The nitrate reductase assay (NRA) has been prop...

Experiments were conducted to determine whether the nitrate flux to the leaves or the nitrate content of the leaves regulated the nitrate reductase activity (NRA) in leaves of intact maize (Zea mays L.) seedlings having low water potentials (psi(w)) when other environmental and endogenous factors were constant. In seedlings that were desiccated slowly, the nitrate flux, leaf nitrate content, an...

BACKGROUND The evolutionary history of several genes of the bacterial pathogen Streptococcus pyogenes strongly suggests an origin in another species, acquired via replacement of the counterpart gene (ortholog) following a recombination event. An example of orthologous gene replacement is provided by the nra/rofA locus, which encodes a key regulator of pilus gene transcription. Of biological imp...

Spontaneous and provoked nonrespiratory arousals can be accompanied by a patterned hemodynamic response. To investigate whether a patterned response is also elicited by respiratory arousals, we compared nonrespiratory arousals (NRA) to respiratory arousals (RA) induced by airway occlusion during non-rapid eye movement sleep. We monitored mean arterial blood pressure (MAP), heart rate, iliac and...

This paper introduces a core calculus for pattern-matching in production rule languages: the Calculus for Aggregating Matching Patterns (CAMP). CAMP is expressive enough to capture modern rule languages such as JRules, including extensions for aggregation. We show how CAMP can be compiled into a nested-relational algebra (NRA), with only minimal extension. This paves the way for applying relati...

Efficient processing of top-k queries has become a classical research area. Fagin et al. proposed the “middleware cost” for a top-k query algorithm. In some scenario, there is no way to perform a random access, and Fagin et al. proposed NRA (No Random Access) algorithm for that. In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic relation between top-k queries and K-skyband queries. Based on that relat...

Assimilatory nitrate reductase activity (NRA) in crude spinach leaf (Spinacia oleracea) extracts undergoes rapid changes following fluctuations in photosynthesis brought about by changes in external CO(2) or by water stress (WM Kaiser, E Brendle-Behnisch [1991] Plant Physiol 96:363-367). A modulation of NRA sharing several characteristics (stability, response to Mg(2+) or Ca(2+), kinetic consta...