The FimA fimbriae of Porphyromonas gingivalis, the causative agent of periodontitis, have been implicated in various aspects of pathogenicity, such as colonization, adhesion and aggregation. In this study, the four open reading frames (ORF1, ORF2, ORF3 and ORF4) downstream of the fimbrilin gene (fimA) in strain ATCC 33277 were examined. ORF2, ORF3 and ORF4 were demonstrated to encode minor comp...

In this paper, we propose a generic concept of ”Flexible Intelligence Machine Control (FIMC)” which acquires control knowledge from the operation data of expert operators and places higher-level automation on conventional-level cnotrol. And we show two practical examples of FIMC including temperature control on the actual jacket tank in polymerization process and automatic start-up operation of...

The parallel-distributed compensation (PDC) together with Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy modelling proved to be a modern model-based systematic approach for the design of fuzzy nonlinear controllers from stability and robustness requirements. The usual local linear controllers comprise a state feedback. This requires measurements of the state variables or an observer design. The aim of the pres...

To examine the genetic background of avian pathogenic Escherichia coli (APEC) that affects virulence of this microorganism, we characterized the virulence genes of 101 APEC strains isolated from infected chickens between 1985 ˜ 2005. Serotypes were determined with available anti-sera and median lethal doses were determined in subcutaneously inoculated chicks. The virulence genes we tested inclu...

Biogenesis of the type 1 pilus fiber in Escherichia coli requires the product of the fimC locus. We have demonstrated that FimC is a member of the periplasmic chaperone family. The deduced primary sequence of FimC shows a high degree of homology to PapD and fits well with the derived consensus sequence for periplasmic chaperones, predicting that it has an immunoglobulin-like topology. The chape...

The fimbriae of Porphyromonas gingivalis mediate critical roles in host colonization and evasion of innate defenses and comprise polymerized fimbrilin (FimA) associated with quantitatively minor accessory proteins (FimCDE) of unknown function. We now show that P. gingivalis fimbriae lacking FimCDE fail to interact with the CXC-chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4), and bacteria expressing FimCDE-deficie...

Adhesive type 1 pili from uropathogenic Escherichia coli are filamentous protein complexes that are attached to the assembly platform FimD in the outer membrane. During pilus assembly, FimD binds complexes between the chaperone FimC and type 1 pilus subunits in the periplasm and mediates subunit translocation to the cell surface. Here we report nuclear magnetic resonance and X-ray protein struc...

In this study, we performed a validation analysis of a crosswalk that converts Functional Independence Measure (FIM) scores to Minimum Data Set (MDS) scores and vice versa in order to achieve score compatibility. Data from 2,130 patients were obtained from the Department of Veteran Affairs' Austin Automation Center. The conversion algorithm was tested at the (1) individual patient level, (2) cl...

The periplasmic chaperone FimC is a monomeric, basic 23 kDa protein of 205 amino acid residues (Klemm, 1992) that mediates the assembly of typeI pili in Escherichia coli. Type-I pili are oligomeric protein complexes anchored on the surface of the bacterium and are required for the attachment of E. coli cells to host cell surfaces that are rich in mannose (Klemm, 1992). The determination of the ...

A peptide library targeting protein-protein interactions crucial for pilus assembly in Gram negative bacteria has been designed using statistical molecular design. A nonamer peptide scaffold was used, with seven positions being varied. The selection was performed in the building block space, and previously known structure-activity data were included in the design procedure. This resulted in a h...