BACKGROUND A previous pilot study showed a high frequency of anti-smooth muscle autoantibody in Omani blood donors and pregnant women. We conducted this larger-scale study to investigate the frequency and significance of several autoantibodies in healthy individuals from different regions of Oman. METHODS Sera obtained from 1537 healthy Omanis (1153 males and 384 females), ranging in age from...

The β-proteobacterium Aromatoleum aromaticum degrades the aromatic ketone acetophenone, a key intermediate of anaerobic ethylbenzene metabolism, either aerobically or anaerobically via a complex ATP-dependent acetophenone carboxylase and a benzoylacetate-CoA ligase. The genes coding for these enzymes (apcABCDE and bal) are organized in an apparent operon and are expressed in the presence of the...

BACKGROUND In Tanzania, a country of 42 million, access to oral morphine is rare. AIM To demonstrate the effectiveness of palliative care teams in reducing patients' pain and in increasing other positive life qualities in the absence of morphine; and to document the psychological burden experienced by their clinical providers, trained in morphine delivery, as they observed their patients suff...

Background. Human-Immunodeficiency-Virus- (HIV-) related Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) has a high prevalence in Africa; however, there is minimal published data on treatment and outcomes in this population. Objective and Design. This was a prospective study of 50 patients, aiming to assess the impact of vincristine therapy on tumour response and survival and to assess palliative care outcomes in patien...

In this paper we combined the projection–substitution with ARSIS (French acronym for ‘‘Amélioration de la Résolution Spatiale par Injection de Structures”, i.e., Improving Spatial Resolution by Structure Injection) concept assumption for fusion of panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images. Firstly support value filter (SVF) is used to establish a new multiscale model (MSM), support vecto...

Efficient and accurate similarity searching for a large amount of time series data set is an important but non-trivial problem. Many dimensionality reduction techniques have been proposed for effective representation of time series data in order to realize such similarity searching, including Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), the Discrete Fourier transform (DFT), the Adaptive Piecewise Consta...

Phycobiliproteins are water-soluble, light-harvesting proteins that are highly fluorescent due to linear tetrapyrrole chromophores, which makes them valuable as probes. Enzymes called bilin lyases usually attach these bilin chromophores to specific cysteine residues within the alpha and beta subunits via thioether linkages. A multiplasmid coexpression system was used to recreate the biosyntheti...

To verify the possible effect of IFN-beta treatment on auto antibodies development in multiple sclerosis (MS) we studied 69 MS patients before and during the treatment with IFN-beta 1b (n=35) and IFN-beta 1a (n=20) for 27 and 12 months respectively, and, as controls, 14 untreated MS patients. The serum, collected every 3 months from all the patients, was investigated for the presence of antinuc...

Image matching using feature extraction is an important issue in computer vision tasks. The main drawback of matching process is the bottleneck problem that rapidly appeared when the number of features increased. This paper produced an adaptive approach to improve Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) matching. The main idea is to increase the number of SIFT points by using Adaptive PCA in w...

The Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 genome encodes three genes, denoted cpcS-I, cpcU, cpcV, with sequence similarity to cpeS. CpcSI copurified with His6-tagged (HT) CpcU as a heterodimer, CpcSU. When CpcSU was assayed for bilin lyase activity in vitro with phycocyanobilin (PCB) and apo-phycocyanin (PC), the reaction product had an absorbance maximum of 622 nm and was highly fluorescent (λmax = 643 n...