A novel gene that regulates the alpha-toxin (plc), kappa-toxin (colA), and theta;-toxin (pfoA) genes was identified using toxin-negative mutant strains of Clostridium perfringens. The cloned 3.2-kb fragment contained the virX gene encoding a 51-amino acid polypeptide of unknown function that seemed to be responsible for the activation of toxin genes. The virX knock out mutant of wild-type strai...

Compression is typically used for databases that have grown large enough to create a strain on system storage capacity. We argue here that database compression is attractive from a query processing viewpoint also and should therefore be implemented even when disk storage is plentiful. We study the compression ratio and query processing performance of a variety of compression algorithms, for dii...

Colour changes in Gradia Direct™ composite after immersion in tea, coffee, red wine, Coca-Cola, Colgate mouthwash, and distilled water were evaluated using principal component analysis (PCA) and the CIELAB colour coordinates. The reflection spectra of the composites were used as input data for the PCA. The output data (scores and loadings) provided information about the magnitude and origin of ...

Model-driven development (MDD) has become a success story and a de facto standard in the development of safety-critical embedded systems. The daily work in the development of such systems cannot be imagined without industry standard CASE tools like e.g. MATLAB/Simulink. Often however, the analysis capabilities of such tools are limited. Therefore, we propose to combine them with the powerful an...

Intellectual property is every bit as important as physical property. For many corporations, intangible assets like brands and trademarks are even more valuable than tangible assets (Hopkins, 2003). For example, the Coca-Cola brand name is far more valuable than the ingredients that go into a can of Coca-Cola (Hopkins, 2003). Businesses expend a great deal of time, energy, and resources to prot...

An HPLC method was developed for the simultaneous separation and identification of furanic compounds as the possible degradation products of sugars and ascorbic acid on heating. 5-(Hydroxymethyl)furfural (5-HMF), furfural, 2-furoic acid, 2,5-dimethyl-4-hydroxy-3(2H)-furanone (DMHF), 2-acetylfuran, and six unknown compounds were separated and detected in fruit juice concentrates with or without ...