Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio cholerae are ubiquitous to estuarine and marine environments. These two species found in Mediterranean coastal systems can induce infections in humans. Environmental isolates of V. cholerae (n = 109) and V. parahaemolyticus (n = 89) sampled at different dates, stations and water salinities were investigated for virulence genes and by a multilocus sequence-base...

This paper presents a text to speech (TTS) extension to Kaldi a liberally licensed open source speech recognition system. The system, Idlak Tangle, uses recent deep neural network (DNN) methods for modelling speech, the Idlak XML based text processing system as the front end, and a newly released open source mixed excitation MLSA vocoder included in Idlak. The system has none of the licensing r...

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) can establish symbiotic associations with several Rhizobium species; however, the effectiveness of most strains at fixing nitrogen under field conditions is very low. PRF 81(T) is a very effective strain, usually referred to as Rhizobium tropici and used successfully in thousands of doses of commercial inoculants for the common bean crop in Brazil; it has sho...

Female members of many cephalopod species house a bacterial consortium in the accessory nidamental gland (ANG), part of the reproductive system. These bacteria are deposited into eggs that are then laid in the environment where they must develop unprotected from predation, pathogens, and fouling. In this study, we characterized the genome and secondary metabolite production of Leisingera sp. JC...

Acacia senegal (L) Willd. and Acacia seyal Del. are highly nitrogen-fixing and moderately salt tolerant species. In this study we focused on the genetic and genomic diversity of Acacia mesorhizobia symbionts from diverse origins in Senegal and investigated possible correlations between the genetic diversity of the strains, their soil of origin, and their tolerance to salinity. We first performe...

Multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MLVA) is efficient for routine typing and for investigating the genetic structures of natural microbial populations. Two distinct pathovars of Xanthomonas oryzae can cause significant crop losses in tropical and temperate rice-growing countries. Bacterial leaf streak is caused by X. oryzae pv. oryzicola, and bacterial leaf blight is caused by X...

Here, we propose an extension of the Partition of Unit Finite Element Method (PUFEM) and a numerical procedure for the solution of J2 plasticity problems. The proposed method is based in the Moving Least Square Approximation (MLSA) and is capable of overcoming singularity problems, in the global shape functions, resulting from the consideration of linear or higher order base functions, in the c...

A high-resolution amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) methodology was developed to achieve the delineation of closely related Lactococcus lactis strains. The differentiation depth of 24 enzyme-primer-nucleotide combinations was experimentally evaluated to maximize the number of polymorphisms. The resolution depth was confirmed by performing diversity analysis on 82 L. lactis strains, ...

Despite the importance of population structure for the epidemiology of pathogenic bacteria, the spatial and ecological heterogeneity of these populations is often poorly characterized. Here, we investigated the genetic diversity and population structure of the Lyme borreliosis (LB) spirochaete Borrelia garinii in its marine cycle involving colonial seabirds and different host races of the seabi...

One of the most urgent needs from leprosy research is a test for infection. The lepromin test is not suitable as a diagnostic test for leprosy, and neither the Rees nor the Convit soluble antigens has appeared sufficiently specific. Because two new antigens, MLSA-LAM and MLCwA, may not fully meet the requirements for specificity, we have embarked upon the preparation of a second generation of s...