Washed cells of Mycoplasma pneumoniae mixed with complete Freund's adjuvant were capable of producing lethal anaphylactic shock in mice when injected repeatedly into the foot pad. The causative agent is associated with horse serum contained in the culture medium but cannot be removed from mycoplasmal cells by repeated washing with phosphate buffered saline. Mycoplasmas grown in medium containin...

Screens for zygotic lethal mutations that are associated with specific maternal effect lethal phenotypes have only been conducted for the X chromosome. To identify loci on the autosomes, which represent four-fifths of the Drosophila genome, we have used the autosomal "FLP-DFS" technique to screen a collection of 496 P element-induced mutations established by the Berkeley Drosophila Genome Proje...

The cytotoxic activity of lethal factor (LF), a critical reagent used in the cell-based lethal toxin neutralization assay to assess anthrax vaccines, was shown to depend on the identity of its N-terminal amino acid, which plays a role in the targeting of LF to the proteasome for degradation. These results demonstrate that care must be taken to ensure that LF preparations used in standardized ce...

background and objectives : due to the extensive use of antibiotics, the spread of drug-resistant bacteria is one of the most worrisome threats to public health. one strategy that can be used to overcome potential shortcomings might be the inactivation of these organisms by photodynamic therapy. in this study, we have investigated whether drug-resistant wound-associated organisms (staphylococcu...

Nickel oxide in the form of nanoparticles (NiO NPs) is extensively used in different industrial branches. In a test on adult zebrafish, the acute toxicity of NiO NPs was shown to be low, however longlasting contact with this compound can lead to its accumulation in the tissues and to increased toxicity. In this work we determined the 30-day toxicity of NiO NPs using a static test for zebrafish ...

Within D=5 N=2 gauged supergravity coupled to hypermultiplets we derive consistency conditions for BPS domain walls with constant negative curvature on the wall. For such wall solutions to exist, the covariant derivative of the projector, governing the constraint on the Killing spinor, has to be non-zero and proportional to the cosmological constant on the domain walls. We also prove that in th...

A low-energy background field solution describing D-membrane configurations is constructed which is distinguished by the appearance of a Hermitian metric on the internal space. This metric is composed of a number of independent harmonic functions on the transverse space. Thus this construction generalizes the usual harmonic superposition rule. The BPS bound of these solutions is shown to be sat...

The effects of humic acid and water hardness on acute cadmium toxicity and accumulation were determined, using Puntius gonionotus Bleeker. The toxicities were expressed as the median lethal concentration (LC50) and the 96-h LC50 value of cadmium was 2.30 mg/L. Three different types of water hardness were used: soft, moderately-hard and hard, with total hardness concentrations of 55, 113, and 22...