BACKGROUND Acinetobacter baumannii is one of the most important pathogens capable of colonization in burn patients, leading to drug-resistant wound infections. This study evaluated the distribution of the AdeABC efflux system genes and their relationship to ciprofloxacin resistance in A. baumannii isolates collected from burn patients. METHODS A total of 68 A. baumannii clinical strains were ...

The ocean's strong ionic environment may be important for motility in marine bacteria. This is because flagellar motors are powered by dissipation of ion gradients across their cell membranes. We tested how much the 2 known motor systems contributed to the high speed motility (> l00 pm SS') found in marine bacterial communities and isolates. Monensin, carbonylcyanide-mchlorophenylhydrozone (CCC...

The Capacitated Centred Clustering Problem (CCCP) consists in partitioning a set of n points into p disjoint clusters with a known capacity. Each cluster is specified by a centroid. The objective is to minimize the total dissimilarity within each cluster, such that a given capacity limit of the cluster is not exceeded. This paper presents a solution procedure for the CCCP, using the hybrid meta...

Selected fluorescent dyes were tested for uptake by mitochrondria in intact cells of barley, maize, and onion. The cationic cyanine dye 3,3'-diheptyloxacarbocyanine iodide [DiOC(7)(3)] accumulated in mitochondria within 15 to 30 minutes without appreciable staining of other protoplasmic constituents. The number, shape, and movement of the fluorescent mitochondria could be seen readily, and the ...

We address the problem of finding the most likely assignment or MAP estimation in a Markov random field. We analyze the linear programming formulation of MAP through the lens of difference of convex functions (DC) programming, and use the concaveconvex procedure (CCCP) to develop efficient message-passing solvers. The resulting algorithms are guaranteed to converge to a global optimum of the we...

Computingmaximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation in graphical models is an important inference problem with many applications. We present message-passing algorithms for quadratic programming (QP) formulations of MAP estimation for pairwise Markov random fields. In particular, we use the concaveconvex procedure (CCCP) to obtain a locally optimal algorithm for the non-convex QP formulation. A simil...

The cellular abnormalities in Parkinson's disease (PD) include mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative damage, which are probably induced by both genetic predisposition and environmental factors. Mitochondrial dysfunction has long been implicated in the pathogenesis of PD. The recent discovery of genes associated with the etiology of familial PD has emphasized the role of mitochondrial dysfunct...

The metabolism of nitric oxide in Paracoccus denitrificans has been studied using a Clark-type electrode. The uncoupler carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone (CCCP) and the SH reagent N-ethylmaleimide, both of which released nitric oxide from cells respiring nitrite, were found to be efficient inhibitors of nitric oxide reductase activity. Control experiments with another uncoupler, pentachl...

Effects of respiratory inhibitors on the circadian clock, respiratory activity, and ATP content were examined in Neurospora crassa. All inhibitors, potassium cyanide, sodium azide, antimycin A, and carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenyl hydrazone (CCCP), shifted the phase of the conidiation rhythm. All the phase response curves were similar and resembled that for cycloheximide, but were different from...

Loopy and generalized belief propagation are popular algorithms for approximate inference in Markov random fields and Bayesian networks. Fixed points of these algorithms correspond to extrema of the Bethe and Kikuchi free energy (Yedidia et al., 2001). However, belief propagation does not always converge, which motivates approaches that explicitly minimize the Kikuchi/Bethe free energy, such as...