To characterize the nature of NaCl transport in the thin ascending limb (tAL), we examined the transport properties of Na(+) and Cl(-) using in vitro microperfusion of the tAL in CLC-K1 null mice. In the presence of a transmural NaCl concentration gradient (100 mM higher in the lumen), the transepithelial diffusion voltage (V(d)) was 15.5 +/- 1.0 and -7.6 +/- 1.4 mV in CLC-K1(+/+) and CLC-K1(-/...

Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is a member of the gammaherpesvirus family. KSHV is the etiologic agent of Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma, and multicentric Castleman's disease. The first open reading frame of the KSHV genome encodes a type 1 transmembrane glycoprotein named K1. K1 is structurally similar to the B-cell receptor (BCR), and its cytoplasmic tail contains...

It has long been conjectured that the crossing numbers of links are additive under the connected sum of links. This is a difficult problem in knot theory and has been open for more than 100 years. In fact, we do not even know that Cr(K1#K2) = Cr(K1) or Cr(K1#K2) = Cr(K2) holds in general, here K1#K2 is the connected sum of K1 and K2 and Cr(K) stands for the crossing number of the link K. The be...

Hypervirulent strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae (hvKP) are genetic variants of K. pneumoniae which can cause life-threatening community-acquired infection in healthy individuals. Currently, methods for efficient differentiation between classic K. pneumoniae (cKP) and hvKP strains are not available, often causing delay in diagnosis and treatment of hvKP infections. To address this issue, we devis...

OBJECTIVE Patients who appear to have both stimulating and blocking TSHR autoantibodies in their sera have been described, but the two activities have not been separated and analysed. We now describe the isolation and detailed characterization of a blocking type TSHR monoclonal autoantibody and a stimulating type TSHR monoclonal autoantibody from a single sample of peripheral blood lymphocytes....

A (δ ≥ k1, δ ≥ k2)-partition of a graph G is a vertex-partition (V1, V2) of G satisfying that δ(G[Vi]) ≥ ki for i = 1, 2. We determine, for all positive integers k1, k2, the complexity of deciding whether a given graph has a (δ ≥ k1, δ ≥ k2)-partition. We also address the problem of finding a function g(k1, k2) such that the (δ ≥ k1, δ ≥ k2)-partition problem is NP-complete for the class of gra...