To introduce a free sulfhydryl into Pseudomonas aeruginosa exotoxin A (ETA), methionine 161 in domain I of the toxin was changed to cysteine by site-directed mutagenesis. The free sulfhydryl provides a convenient site for covalent attachment of ETA to other proteins in the production of chimeric toxins. The mutation was then introduced into a variant of ETA that is impaired in receptor binding,...

OBJECTIVE The main objective was to compare the cost-effectiveness of therapeutic options in moderate or severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA) when a clinical response to a first TNF-blocker, either etanercept (ETA), adalimumab (ADA), or infliximab (INF), is insufficient. METHODS Effectiveness criteria were defined as remission (RS), low disease activity (LDAS), and moderate to high disease activi...

Collecting duct (CD)-derived endothelin-1 (ET-1) acting via endothelin B (ETB) receptors promotes Na(+) excretion. Compromise of ET-1 signaling or ETB receptors in the CD cause sodium retention and increase blood pressure. Activity of the epithelial Na(+) channel (ENaC) is limiting for Na(+) reabsorption in the CD. To test for ETB receptor regulation of ENaC, we combined patch-clamp electrophys...

Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) improve the mobility of visually-impaired persons, but it is not easy to develop an ETA satisfying all the factors needed for reliable object detection, effective notification, and actual usability. In this study, the authors developed an easy-to-use ETA having the function of reliable object detection and its successful feedback to the user by tactile stimulation....

The shear viscosity of liquid copper is studied using nonequilibrium molecular-dynamics simulations under planar shear flow conditions. We examined variation of viscosity as function of shear rate at a range of pressures (ca. 0 - 40 GPa). We analyzed these results using eight different phenomenological models and find that the observed non-Newtonian behavior is best described by the Powell-Eyri...

We study asymptotic expansions of the smeared L2-traces Fe−tP 2 and FPe−tP 2 , where P is an operator of Dirac type and F is an auxiliary smooth endomorphism. We impose chiral bag boundary conditions depending on an angle θ. Studying the θ-dependence of the above trace invariants, θindependent pieces are identified. The associated stability theorems allow one to show the regularity of the eta f...

We study the arithmetic of so-called primary Burniat surfaces, a family of surfaces of general type arising as smooth bidouble covers of a del Pezzo surface of degree 6 and at the same time as étale quotients of certain hypersurfaces in a product of three elliptic curves. We give a new explicit description of their moduli space and determine their possible automorphism groups. We also give an e...

The Manin constant of an elliptic curve is an invariant that arises in connection with the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer. One conjectures that this constant is 1; it is known to be an integer. After surveying what is known about the Manin constant, we establish a new sufficient condition that ensures that the Manin constant is an odd integer. Next, we generalize the notion of the Mani...