BACKGROUND Collection technique is critical in the performance of the Papanicolaou (Pap) smear as an important screening tool for cervical cancer. While superior devices have been established, less effective devices continue to be used for both conventional and liquid-based Pap smears. Our aim is to determine the performance of collection devices currently used in obtaining conventional Pap sme...

Phytoplasmas are dangerous bacteria severely infecting agricultural production worldwide. In the present study, identification of phytoplasmas tomato plants showing symptoms such as small leaves, flower abnormalities, stunting, witches' broom, and reddening was performed. Five plants, two symptomatic three asymptomatic, were tested to verify phytoplasma infection. Total DNA isolated from 5 leaf...

The multilayer multiconfiguration time-dependent Hartree (ML-MCTDH) method is discussed and a fully general implementation for any number of layers based on the recursive ML-MCTDH algorithm given by Manthe [J. Chem. Phys. 128, 164116 (2008)] is presented. The method is applied first to a generalized Henon-Heiles (HH) hamiltonian. For 6D HH the overhead of ML-MCTDH makes the method slower than M...

The activity-guided fractionation of the MeOH extract of the flower of Paulownia coreana led to the isolation of a new geranylated flavanone, 3'-O-methyl-5'-hydroxydiplacol (1), along with 10 known compounds (2-11). Their structures were determined using spectroscopic techniques, which included one and two dimensional (1- and 2D)-NMR. Among the isolates, compounds 1-6 showed potent inhibitory a...

Dissecting the luminosity function of the Coma cluster of galaxies by means of CFHT wide field images Abstract. By means of wide–field (42 × 28 arcmin) CCD images of the Coma cluster of galaxies and of control fields, taken at the Canada– France–Hawaii telescope with the CFH12K and UH8K cameras, we determine the luminosity function bi–variate in central brightness. We found a clear progression ...

The bacterial genus "Candidatus Phytoplasma" contains a group of insect-transmitted plant pathogens in the class Mollicutes. Here, we report a draft genome assembly and annotation of strain NCHU2014, which belongs to the 16SrII-A subgroup within this genus and is associated with purple coneflower witches' broom disease in Taiwan.

The eccentric connectivity index ξ is a distance–based molecular structure descriptor that was recently used for mathematical modeling of biological activities of diverse nature. We prove that the broom has maximum ξ among trees with a fixed maximum vertex degree, and characterize such trees with minimum ξ . In addition, we propose a simple linear algorithm for calculating ξ of trees.

In this squib, we study some symmetry patterns that arise from introducing a notion of duality in categorial grammar. We first look at residuated and dually residuated families of operations, in syntax and semantics. Inspecting the monotonicity properties of these operations, we then identify a further set of (dually) Galois connected binary operations, hitherto uninvestigated in the linguistic...