In the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, normal prion protein (PrP-sen) is converted to a protease-resistant isoform, PrP-res, by an apparent self-propagating activity of the latter. Here we describe new, more physiological cell-free systems for analyzing the initial binding and subsequent conversion reactions between PrP-sen and PrP-res. These systems allowed the use of antibodies to ...

BACKGROUND SEN virus is a blood-borne, single-stranded, nonenveloped DNA virus. Two of its strains (D and H), appear to be associated with non-A-to-E hepatitis more frequently than the others, although it is not clear whether this observation has any significance. The prevalence of SEN virus in otherwise healthy individuals, including blood donors, differs markedly by geographic region. In this...

We show that the widely used Kendall tau correlation coefficient, and the related Mallows kernel, are positive definite kernels for permutations. They offer computationally attractive alternatives to more complex kernels on the symmetric group to learn from rankings, or learn to rank. We show how to extend these kernels to partial rankings, multivariate rankings and uncertain rankings. Examples...

We study equational axiomatizations of bisimulation equivalence for the language obtained by extending Milner's basic CCS with string iteration. String iteration is a variation on the original binary version of the Kleene star operation p q obtained by restricting the rst argument to be a non-empty sequence of atomic actions. We show that, for every positive integer k, bisimulation equivalence ...

Comparing and ranking information is an important topic in social and information sciences, and in particular on the web. Its objective is to measure the difference of the preferences of voters on a set of candidates and to compute a consensus ranking. Commonly, each voter provides a total order of all candidates. In this work we consider the generalization of total orders and bucket orders to ...

The Kendall (1955) rank correlation coefficient evaluates the degree of similarity between two sets of ranks given to a same set of objects. This coefficient depends upon the number of inversions of pairs of objects which would be needed to transform one rank order into the other. In order to do so, each rank order is represented by the set of all pairs of objects (e.g., [a,b] and [b,a] are the...

BACKGROUND Short bowel syndrome (SBS) can lead to intestinal failure and require total or supplemental parenteral nutrition (TPN or PN, respectively). Glucagon-like peptide 2 (GLP-2) is a nutrient-dependent, proglucagon-derived gut hormone that stimulates intestinal adaptation. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to determine whether supplemental enteral nutrients (SEN) modulate the intestinotrophic ...