Primary lateral sclerosis (PLS) is a diagnosis of exclusion in patients with progressive spinobulbar spasticity and could be part of the clinical spectrum of ALS. Unlike ALS, which is familial in 5 to 10% of the cases, PLS has been described as a sporadic disorder in adults. The authors report two patients with PLS from unrelated SOD1-negative familial ALS families. These observations provide f...

Partial Least Squares (PLS) is a widely used technique in chemometrics, especially in the case where the number of independent variables is significantly larger than the number of data points. There are many articles on PLS [HTF01, GK86] but the mathematical details of PLS do not always come out clearly in these treatments. This paper is an attempt to describe PLS in precise and simple mathemat...

Partial least squares (PLS) is an efficient statistical regression technique that is highly suited for the analysis of genomic and proteomic data. In this article, we review both the theory underlying PLS as well as a host of bioinformatics applications of PLS. In particular, we provide a systematic comparison of the PLS approaches currently employed, and discuss analysis problems as diverse as...

This study assesses physicians’ intention to engage with electronic medical records (EMR) in the context of pre-EMR implementation in developing countries. We developed a model and corresponding hypotheses grounded in the sociocognitive theory and the decomposed theory of planned behavior. A survey of physicians in the Middle-East was conducted and the results empirically analyzed via PLS. We f...

Social virtual worlds (SVWs) have become increasingly important environments for social interaction, especially for the younger generations. For SVWs to be economically sustainable, attracting new users and retaining the existing ones existing users is a paramount issue. This calls for understanding of the reasons why people engage in social virtual worlds. This study investigates the motives f...

Governments worldwide have, increasingly, implemented e-government initiatives for their potential significant benefits; among which, delivering better services to citizens through increasing citizens' convenience, satisfaction, and independence; and saving their time, effort, and cost. Achieving each benefit is an objective to these governments and fulfilling each objective is considered a cri...

In the last few years, the number of Internet users in Indonesia was growing rapidly as many people started to use e-commerce sites. Utilization of C2C e-commerce in particular has a risk that may reduce people interest in online shopping. Of the many factors that may influence online shopping intention, trust becomes the key. This study built a model to explain the purchase intention in the C2...

Transcriptomic and peptidomic analysis of skin secretions from the Painted-belly leaf frog Phyllomedusa sauvagii led to the identification of 5 novel phylloseptins (PLS-S2 to -S6) and also of phylloseptin-1 (PSN-1, here renamed PLS-S1), the only member of this family previously isolated in this frog. Synthesis and characterization of these phylloseptins revealed differences in their antimicrobi...

Most bacterial glycoproteins identified to date are virulence factors of pathogenic bacteria, i.e. adhesins and invasins. However, the impact of protein glycosylation on the major human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus remains incompletely understood. To study protein glycosylation in staphylococci, we analyzed lysostaphin lysates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains by S...

The p21-activated kinases (PAKs) play essential roles in diverse cellular processes and are required for cell proliferation, apoptosis, polarity establishment, migration, and cell shape changes. Here, we have identified a novel function for the group I PAKs in cell-cell fusion. We show that the two Drosophila group I PAKs, DPak3 and DPak1, have partially redundant functions in myoblast fusion i...