Medicinal plants are used as a popular alternative to synthetic drugs, both in developed and developing countries. The economic importance of the herbal and natural supplement industry is increasing every year. As the herbal industry grows, consumer safety is one issue that cannot be overlooked. Herbal products in Thai local markets are commonly sold without packaging or labels. Plant powders a...

BACKGROUND A variety of plants in Acanthaceae have long been used in traditional Thai ailment and commercialised with significant economic value. Nowadays medicinal plants are sold in processed forms and thus morphological authentication is almost impossible. Full identification requires comparison of the specimen with some authoritative sources, such as a full and accurate description and veri...

Ureaplasma sp. infection in neonates and adults underlies a variety of disease pathologies. Of the two human Ureaplasma spp., Ureaplasma parvum is clinically the most common. We have developed a high-resolution melt (HRM) PCR assay for the differentiation of the four serovars of U. parvum in a single step. Currently U. parvum strains are separated into four serovars by sequencing the promoter a...

This paper examines the economic rationality of Japanese-style human resource management (HRM) and provides an overview of how and in what historical context Japanese firms formed such a model, which had no precedent in the Western world. The core of the Japanese model is an employer’s promise to provide human capital investment and employment security to regular employees in exchange for their...

BACKGROUND The level of viral diversity in an HIV-infected individual can change during the course of HIV infection, reflecting mutagenesis during viral replication and selection of viral variants by immune and other selective pressures. Differences in the level of viral diversity in HIV-infected infants may reflect differences in viral dynamics, immune responses, or other factors that may also...

PURPOSE The prognosis of people infected with Fungi especially immunocompromised depends on rapid and accurate diagnosis to capitalize on time administration of specific treatments. However, cultures produce false negative results and nucleic-acid amplification techniques require complex post-amplification procedures to differentiate relevant fungal types. The objective of this work was to deve...

BACKGROUND High resolution melting (HRM) is an emerging new method for interrogating and characterizing DNA samples. An important aspect of this technology is data analysis. Traditional HRM curves can be difficult to interpret and the method has been criticized for lack of statistical interrogation and arbitrary interpretation of results. METHODS Here we report the basic principles and first ...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how functional and numerical flexibility can be successfully combined without workforce segmentation or flexible employment contracts, by implementing a highly integrated human resource management (HRM) system. Design/methodology/approach – Six case studies were conducted between January 2002 and June 2003 in Portuguese affiliates of multinational management...

The atmospheric water vapor is a very important variable for the hydrological cycle and for short term numerical weather prediction. Groundbased GPS data are applied to validate the vertically integrated water vapor (IWV) as derived with the HRM model (High resolution Regional Model) of the German Weather Service (DWD) within the BAL.TEX (Baltic Sea Experiment) region. Data of the PIDCAP period...

Introduction Performance, in the context of organisation, is not only a broad concept which has been used synonymously with productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, and more recently competitiveness, it has also been a subject of study for social scientists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. Labour productivity, for example, has long been the concern of (labour) economists ever sin...