Consumer disposition to the information quality of the website, trust, privacy concerns, reputation, security concerns, and the company’s reputation have strong effects on Internet consumers’ trust in the website. Major two critical problems for both e-commerce consumers and sites are privacy and security. Privacy is the control over one’s personal data whereas; security is the attempted access...

A student, supported by his classmates, throws a piece of chalk at the teacher who is writing on the blackboard. The teacher rapidly turns back and promptly catches him in the act. The student blushes and suddenly realizes how bad it was what he did. What happened to the guy? Why did he decide to throw the piece of chalk? And why, after a few seconds, he would have liked that what he did had ne...

A growing amount of tasks are expected to be delegated to software agents by human users. Such agents carry personal data of the user and act on his behalf. Especially if mobile software agents leave the users’ host, the users are left with an uncomfortable lack of knowledge about and control over “what’s going on”. We believe that an important remedy to this, each of comfort and trust, lies in...

There is a recognized need to employ autonomous agents in domains that are not amenable to conventional automation and/or which humans find difficult, dangerous, or undesirable to perform. These include time-critical and mission-critical applications in health, defense, transportation, and industry, where the consequences of failure can be catastrophic. A prerequisite for such applications is t...

Human calprotectin (CP) is a metal-chelating antimicrobial protein of the innate immune response. The current working model states that CP sequesters manganese and zinc from pathogens. We report the discovery that CP chelates iron and deprives bacteria of this essential nutrient. Elemental analysis of CP-treated growth medium establishes that CP reduces the concentrations of manganese, iron and...

The enzyme 3-deoxy-manno-octulosonate cytidylyltransferase (CMP-KDO synthetase; CKS) catalyzes the activation of 3-deoxy-manno-octulosonate (KDO) by forming CMP-KDO. It is essential for the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharides in Gram-negative bacteria and is a potential target for the discovery of antibacterial agents. L-CKS from Haemophilus influenzae was overexpressed with a C-terminal hexahi...

BACKGROUND Heterologous protein expression in microorganisms may contribute to identify and demonstrate antifungal activity of novel proteins. The Solanum nigrum osmotin-like protein (SnOLP) gene encodes a member of pathogenesis-related (PR) proteins, from the PR-5 sub-group, the last comprising several proteins with different functions, including antifungal activity. Based on deduced amino aci...