In many consumer-resource systems the consumer population has synchronized reproduction at regular intervals (e.g., years) but consumes the resource and dies continuously, while the resource population grows continuously or has overlapping generations that are short relative to the time between consumer reproductive events. Such systems require "semi-discrete" models that have both discrete and...

BACKGROUND Matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9) plays an important role in tumor invasion and metastasis, including lung cancer. However, whether variations in serum MMP-9 levels can serve as a biomarker for monitoring chemotherapy curative effect remains unclear. This study was designed to investigate the association between variations in serum MMP-9 levels and chemotherapy curative effect in pa...

BACKGROUND Reported concentrations of amyloid beta (1-42) (A beta 42) and tau in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) differ among reports. We investigated the effects of storage temperature, repeated freeze/thaw cycles, and centrifugation on the concentrations of A beta 42 and tau in CSF. METHODS Stability of samples stored at -80 degrees C was determined by use of an accelerated stability testing prot...

The 1-year survival for patients with metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer is only around 35%. We are evaluating the combination of irinotecan (Camptosar) and carboplatin (Paraplatin) in patients with stage IIIB and IV non-small-cell lung cancer. The first five patients received irinotecan, 250 mg/m2 over 90 minutes followed by carboplatin at an area under the concentration-time curve of 5 ove...

In this paper, we study pattern matching conditions in the cycle structures of permutations. We develop methods to find the joint distribution of the number of cycles and the number of cycle descents over the set of permutations in the symmetric group Sn which have no cycle occurrences or no consecutive cycle occurrences of a given pattern or set of patterns. Our methods also allow us to refine...

The hierarchical hypercube network is suitable for massively parallel systems. The number of links in the hierarchical hypercube network forms a compromise between those of the hypercube and the cube-connected cycles. Recently, some interesting properties of the hierarchical hypercube network were investigated. Since the hierarchical hypercube is bipartite. A bipartite graph is bipancyclic if i...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152611.].

Exergy analysis of an integrated molten carbonate fuel cell-turbo expander-steam turbine hybrid cycle has been presented in this study. The proposed cycle has been used as a sustainable energy approach to provide a micro hybrid power plant with high exergy efficiency. To generate electricity by the mentioned system, an externally reformed molten carbonate fuel cell located upstream of the combi...

Let Γ denote a Q-polynomial distance-regular graph with diameter D ≥ 4. Assume that the intersection numbers of Γ satisfy ai = 0 for 0 ≤ i ≤ D − 1 and aD 6= 0. We show that Γ is a polygon, a folded cube, or an Odd graph.