BACKGROUND Helicobacter pylori is a motile microaerophilic bacterium that colonizes the human stomach. H. pylori infection triggers gastric diseases, such as gastritis, peptic ulcer and gastric cancer. Stomach represents a barrier for microorganism colonization, particularly because of its high hydrochloric acid concentration. The main mechanism developed by H. pylori to maintain intracellular ...

BACKGROUND Group A streptococcus (GAS) causes invasive disease, superficial disease, and can asymptomatically colonize humans. Superantigens are one virulence factor found in GAS. Previous studies found associations between the genes that encode superantigens and emm type of GAS. It is unknown if these associations are due to underlying biological factors that limit the distribution of superant...

Streptococcus pyogenes (group A streptococci; GAS) recovered from paediatric pharyngitis (101 isolates) and asymptomatic children (79 isolates) in the same geographical area and period, as well as isolates collected during an enhanced national surveillance programme for GAS invasive diseases (79 isolates), were screened for the incidence of the streptococcal pyrogenic exotoxin (spe) genes speA ...

The M1inv+ subclone of M1 group A streptococci that spread globally in the late 1980s and early 1990s was previously identified by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), M protein, and SpeA exotoxin sequence analyses. Strains representing this subclone were characterized with regard to carriage of bacteriophage and capacity to invade cultured human epithelial cells. The M1inv+ subclon...

The aim of this paper is to clearly demonstrate the importance of finding a good balance between genetic search and local search in the implementation of hybrid evolutionary multicriterion optimization (EMO) algorithms. We first modify the local search part of an existing multi-objective genetic local search (MOGLS) algorithm. In the modified MOGLS algorithm, the computation time spent by local...

Atmospheric pollutants mainly produced by thermal power plants compel to utilize green energy sources such as renewable and hydroelectric in a system. But due blinking behavior of very high rate outages, it has detrimental consequence on overall grid. Demand side management (DSM) programs decrease cost improve system security. This study proposes non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA...