UNLABELLED Differential response patterns to optimal antiviral therapy, peginterferon alpha plus ribavirin, are well documented in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection. Among many factors that may affect therapeutic efficiency, HCV quasispecies (QS) characteristics have been a major focus of previous studies, yielding conflicting results. To obtain a comprehensive understandi...

The bacterial mouse pathogen Citrobacter rodentium causes attaching and effacing (AE) lesions in the same manner as pathogenic Escherichia coli, and is an important model for this mode of pathogenesis. Quorum sensing (QS) involves chemical signalling by bacteria to regulate gene expression in response to cell density. E. coli has never been reported to have N-acylhomoserine lactone (AHL) QS, bu...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a well-known pathogenic bacterium that forms biofilms and produces virulence factors via quorum sensing (QS). Interfering with normal QS interactions between signal molecules and their cognate receptors is a developing strategy for attenuating its virulence. Here we tested the hypothesis that 6-gingerol, a pungent oil of fresh ginger, reduces biofilm formation and viru...

The adjuvant properties of the saponin QS-21 have been known for decades. It is a component of the Adjuvant System AS01 that is used in several vaccine candidates. QS-21 strongly potentiates both cellular and humoral immune responses to purified antigens, yet how it activates immune cells is largely unknown. Here, we report that QS-21 directly activated human monocyte-derived dendritic cells (m...

A generalized definition of quantum stochastic (QS) integrals and differentials is given in the free of adaptiveness and basis form in terms of Malliavin derivative on a projective Fock scale, and their uniform continuity and QS differentiability with respect to the inductive limit convergence is proved. A new form of QS calculus based on an inductive ⋆–algebraic structure in an indefinite spac...

Burkholderia glumae causes rice grain rot and sheath rot by producing toxoflavin, the expression of which is regulated by quorum sensing (QS). The QS systems of B. glumae rely on N-octanoyl homoserine lactone, synthesized by TofI and its cognate receptor TofR, to activate the genes for toxoflavin biosynthesis and an IclR-type transcriptional regulator gene, qsmR. To understand genome-wide trans...

A central problem in Interactive Question Answering (IQA) is how to answer Follow-Up Questions (FU Qs), possibly by taking advantage of information from the dialogue context. We assume that FU Qs can be classified into specific types which determine if and how the correct answer relates to the preceding dialogue. The main goal of this paper is to propose an empirically motivated typology of FU ...

The human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa coordinates the expression of virulence factors by using quorum sensing (QS), a signaling cascade triggered by the QS signal molecule and its receptor, a member of the LuxR family of QS transcriptional factors (LasR). The QS threshold and response in P. aeruginosa is defined by a QS LasR-specific antiactivator (QslA), which binds to LasR and prevents it...

BACKGROUND Quorum sensing (QS) systems play an important role in modulating biofilm formation. Recent studies have found that the QS molecules had complex effects on the host immune systems. In addition, regulatory T cells (Tregs), known as important negative regulators in the immune system, have been found upregulated in multiple chronic infections. Therefore, the QS systems were hypothesized ...