Carcinoma cells found in the blood of cancer patients are predictors of metastatic progression and may guide treatment decisions. Most of the current strategies for detecting circulating tumor cells (CTC) are based on the epithelial markers epithelial cell adhesion molecule and keratin; however, evidence is accumulating that in certain tumor types, these epithelial markers are downregulated dur...

Ontologies as means for conceptualizing and structuring domain knowledge within a community of interest are seen as a key to realize the Semantic Web vision. However, the decentralized nature of the Web makes achieving this consensus across communities difficult, thus, hampering efficient knowledge sharing between them. In order to balance the autonomy of each community with the need for intero...

Malaria is one of the leading public health problems worldwide, with incidence estimated at 219 million and deaths reported at approximately 660,000 in 2010 [1]. Almost 90% of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), of which 91% are in children under five. Young children are most susceptible to malaria due to waning of their passive immunity and an acquired immunity that has not fully d...

Enhancer mapping has been greatly facilitated by various genomic marks associated with it. However, little is available in our toolbox to link enhancers with their target promoters, hampering mechanistic understanding of enhancer–promoter (EP) interaction. We develop and characterize multiple genomic features for distinguishing true EP pairs from noninteracting pairs. We integrate these feature...

Over the last decade, technological advances have revolutionised efforts to understand the role played by microbes in airways disease. With the application of ever more sophisticated techniques, the literature has become increasingly inaccessible to the non-specialist reader, potentially hampering the translation of these gains into improvements in patient care. In this article, we set out the ...

A search for dominant-negative mutant polypeptides hampering infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) replication has been undertaken. We have found that expression of a mutant version of the VP3 structural polypeptide known as VP3/M3, partially lacking the domain responsible for the interaction with the virus-encoded RNA polymerase, efficiently interferes with the IBDV replication cycle. Transfo...

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) have been the focus of research in Requirements Engineering (RE) for more than 20 years. Despite this attention, their ontological nature is still an open question, thereby hampering efforts to develop concepts, tools and techniques for eliciting, modeling, and analyzing them, in order to produce a specification for a system-to-be. In this paper, we propose to...

The comprehension of the pathogenesis of Trypanosoma cruzi-elicited myocarditis is crucial to delineate new therapeutic strategies aiming to ameliorate the inflammation that leads to heart dysfunction, without hampering parasite control. The augmented expression of CCL5/RANTES and CCL3/MIP-1alpha, and their receptor CCR5, in the heart of T. cruzi-infected mice suggests a role for CC-chemokines ...

This study provides a detailed analysis of the existing problems with nuclear safeguards and material accounting in Russia by comparing the existing situation both to U.S. methods and to the system of controls that existed in the Soviet era. It also examines recent U.S. efforts under the Nunn-Lugar initiative to improve safeguards and the system of material accounting and control. Finally, it c...

In Model Driven Engineering, bidirectional transformations are considered a core ingredient for managing both the consistency and synchronization of two or more related models. However, current languages still lack of a common understanding of their semantic implications hampering their applicability in practice. This paper illustrates a set of relevant properties pertaining to bidirectional mo...