b ackg r oun d : pseudomonas aeruginosa is one of the most important oppor- tunistic pathogens responsible for various types of infections. children suffer significant morbidity and mortality due to nosocomial infections. the aim of this study was to investigate the presence of class1 integron, blabel, blaper, blakpc, blavim, blaimp and blaoxagroup-1  genes among p. aeruginosa isolates at child...

Temperature-sensitive periods were determined by application of temperature shifts and shocks to 3 temperature-sensitive cell division arrest (cda) mutants of Tetrahymena thermophila. A restrictive temperature, 36 degrees C, was found at which all 3 mutants are fully penetrant, yet other physiological effects are minimal. At this temperature, the temperature-sensitive period of cdaC2 is a uniqu...

Three PCR techniques (amplification of the psaA, ply, and lytA genes) and a commercial kit (AccuProbe [GenProbe, San Diego, Calif.], based on hybridization with the 16S rRNA gene), all four of which claimed to be specific for Streptococcus pneumoniae, were used to identify 49 alpha-hemolytic streptococcal isolates suspected of being pneumococci. The definite phenotypic identification of these o...

HIV resistance to antiretroviral agents is a major contributory cause of treatment failure. The dynamics of HIV replication, together with patient-, physician-, and drug-related factors, lead to emergence of HIV resistant strains in most of the patients. Phenotypic assays look for an increase in the antiretroviral drug (ARV) concentration that inhibits 50% of the growth of the tested HIV strain...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the first KPC carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae isolate from a Greek hospital, including phenotypic methods to aid recognition of this resistance type. METHODS A carbapenem-resistant clinical isolate of K. pneumoniae was recovered from a hospitalized Greek patient. Detailed susceptibility testing was carried out by the agar dilution method. The isolate wa...

With the advent of modern imaging and measurement technology, complex phenotypes are increasingly represented by large numbers of measurements, which may not bear biological meaning one by one. For such multivariate phenotypes, studying the pairwise associations between all measurements and all alleles is highly inefficient and prevents insight into the genetic pattern underlying the observed p...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Among-population differentiation in phenotypic traits and allelic variation is expected as a consequence of isolation, drift, founder effects and local selection. Therefore, investigating molecular and quantitative genetic divergence is a pre-requisite for studies of local adaptation in response to selection under variable environmental conditions. METHODS Among- and withi...

OBJECTIVES In sib pair studies, quantitative trait loci (QTL) identification may be adversely affected by non-normality in the phenotypic distribution, particularly when subjects falling in the tails of the distribution bias the trait mean or variance. We evaluated the robustness and power of reducing the influence of subjects with extreme phenotypic values by Winsorizing non-normal distributio...