BACKGROUND Rift Valley fever virus is an arthropod-borne human and animal pathogen responsible for large outbreaks of acute and febrile illness throughout Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Reverse genetics technology has been used to develop deletion mutants of the virus that lack the NSs and/or NSm virulence genes and have been shown to be stable, immunogenic and protective against Rift Valley...

BACKGROUND Nipple sparing mastectomy (NSM) can be performed for prophylactic mastectomy and the treatment of selected breast cancer with oncologic safety. The risk of skin and nipple necrosis is a frequent complication of NSM procedure, and it is usually related to surgical technique. However, the role of the breast morphology should be also investigated. METHOD We prospectively performed an ...

The biological function of a nonstructural protein, NSm, of Akabane virus (AKAV) is unknown. In this study, we generated a series of NSm deletion mutant viruses by reverse genetics and compared their phenotypes. The mutant in which the NSm coding region was almost completely deleted could not be rescued, suggesting that NSm plays a role in virus replication. We next generated mutant viruses pos...

Groundnut Bud Necrosis Virus (GBNV) is a tripartite ambisense RNA plant virus that belongs to serogroup IV of Tospovirus genus. Non-Structural protein-m (NSm), which functions as movement protein in tospoviruses, is encoded by the M RNA. In this communication, we demonstrate that despite the absence of any putative transmembrane domain, GBNV NSm associates with membranes when expressed in E. co...

To ensure the re-use of domain ontologies the usual approach relies on a pivot language, e.g., Kif, into and from which the domain ontology is translated. This requires several distinct translators for the diierent target Knowledge Based System (KBS). We propose a solution which uses a unique translator whatever the target KBS, Description Logic, objects or frames. It relies on a Domain Ontolog...

The administration of electronic publication in the Information Era congregates old and new problems, especially those related with Information Retrieval and Automatic Knowledge Extraction. This article presents an Information Retrieval System that uses Natural Language Processing and Ontology to index collection’s texts. We describe a system that constructs a domain specific ontology, starting...

Breakdown of sphingomyelin as catalyzed by the activity of sphingomyelinases profoundly affects biophysical properties of cellular membranes which is particularly important with regard to compartmentalization of surface receptors and their signaling relay. As it is activated both upon TCR ligation and co-stimulation in a spatiotemporally controlled manner, the neutral sphingomyelinase (NSM) has...

BACKGROUND Oral nerve sheath myxoma (NSM) is an uncommon benign neoplasm with Schwann-cell origin, which is frequently mistaken for neurothekeoma. We report a case of NSM on the buccal mucosa in a 42-year-old woman. This case is compared with previously reported cases and a systematic review is performed. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a case report and systematic review of oral cases consi...