All perinatal cases of group A streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) previously documented in English literature have been fatal for the mother, the fetus or both. We present the first report of successful treatment of a mother-infant pair with perinatal STSS. A pregnant woman developed STSS at 34 weeks’ gestation 3 h after delivery, following a 25-h history of fever and sore throat. The pa...

BACKGROUND Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is a global health problem that can result in serious complications associated with collagen degradation. Prolidase is a specific imidodipeptidase that plays an important role in the breakdown of collagen. The aim of this study was to investigate prolidase activity and oxidant-antioxidant status in children with CHB. METHODS This prospective case control s...

Evolutionary algorithms (EA’s) are often well-suited for optimization problems involving several, often conflicting objectives. Since 1985, various evolutionary approaches to multiobjective optimization have been developed that are capable of searching for multiple solutions concurrently in a single run. However, the few comparative studies of different methods presented up to now remain mostly...

When experiencing resource competition or abrupt environmental change, animals often must transition rapidly from an ancestral diet to a novel, derived diet. Yet, little is known about the proximate mechanisms that mediate such rapid evolutionary transitions. Here, we investigated the role of diet-induced, cryptic genetic variation in facilitating the evolution of novel resource-use traits that...

This paper focuses on multi-objective designing of multi-machine Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC) using Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA). The TCSC parameters designing problem is converted to an optimization problem with the multi-objective function including the desired damping factor and the desired damping ratio of the power system modes, which is solved by a SPEA ...

Reproductive character displacement--the evolution of traits that minimize reproductive interactions between species--can promote striking divergence in male signals or female mate preferences between populations that do and do not occur with heterospecifics. However, reproductive character displacement can affect other aspects of mating behaviour. Indeed, avoidance of heterospecific interactio...

To circumvent problems encountered in the synthesis of active chymosin in a number of bacteria and fungi, a recombinant DNA L-form expression system that directed the complete secretion of fully activable prochymosin into the extracellular culture medium was developed. The expression plasmid constructions involved the in-frame fusion of prochymosin cDNA minus codons 1 to 4 to streptococcal pyro...

A Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA 2) approach for solving the multi-objective Environmental / Economic Power Dispatch (EEPD) problem is presented in this paper. In past fuel cost consumption minimization was aim (a single objective function) of economic power dispatch problem. Since clean air act amendments have been applied to reduce SO2 and NOX emissions from plants, utilities ...

The project resource leveling problem was proposed to smooth resource usage and reduce resource fluctuation, while the resource-constrained project scheduling problem focuses on minimizing the project duration with limited resources. Solving the two interrelated problems separately is unlikely to result in a globally optimum schedule. The few integrated optimization methods that have been devel...

Swarming contributes to Proteus mirabilis pathogenicity by facilitating access to the catheterized urinary tract. We previously demonstrated that 0.1-20 mmol/L arginine promotes swarming on normally nonpermissive media and that putrescine biosynthesis is required for arginine-induced swarming. We also previously determined that arginine-induced swarming is pH dependent, indicating that the exte...