Most bacteria can form multicellular communities called biofilms on biotic and abiotic surfaces. This multicellular response to surface contact correlates with an increased resistance to various adverse environmental conditions, including those encountered during infections of the human host and exposure to antimicrobial compounds. Biofilm formation occurs when freely swimming (planktonic) cell...

In this work a set of experiments was undertaken in a pilot-scale WSP system to determine the importance of organic nitrogen sedimentation on ammonium and total nitrogen removals in maturation ponds and its seasonal variation under British weather conditions, from September 2004 to May 2007. The nitrogen content in collected sediment samples varied from 4.17 to 6.78 percent (dry weight) and cal...

Since the definitive identification in 1995 of the bacterial endosymbiont Wolbachia that resides in different tissues of the filarial worm Dirofilaria immitis, there has been increasing interest to understand whether and what role it plays in the pathogenesis of and immune response to heartworm infection. The present study evaluated the effects of treatments on lung pathology in 20 beagle dogs ...

BACKGROUND The risk of cardiovascular disease is increased in patients with severe mental illness (SMI) dramatically reducing life expectancy. METHOD A real world pragmatic service evaluation of a Well-Being Support Program (WSP) was conducted. This was a four-session package delivered over a one-year period by mental health practitioners that had received additional training in providing phy...

Wolbachia, an endosymbiotic bacterium found in most species of filarial parasites, is thought to play a significant role in inducing innate inflammatory responses in lymphatic filariasis patients. However, the Wolbachia-derived molecules that are recognized by the innate immune system have not yet been identified. In this study, we exposed the murine macrophage cell line RAW 264.7 to a recombin...

Improving the hydraulic performance of waste stabilization ponds (WSPs) is an important management strategy to not only ensure protection of public health and the environment, but also to maximize the potential reuse of valuable resources found in the treated effluent. To reuse effluent from WSPs, a better understanding of the factors that impact the hydraulic performance of the system is neede...

Allocating limited computational resources to different clients is always a challenging problem to a web service provider (WSP). Profit density based greedy knapsack algorithm is one simple approach that can ensure near-optimal profit. However, profit gain is sometimes not the only factor concerned in making important management decisions. Other factors, such as the number of clients that a WSP...

The objective of the current study was to investigate the role of waste stabilization ponds (WSP) and wastewater-irrigated sites for the production of mosquitoes of medical importance. Mosquito larvae were collected fortnightly from July 2001 to June 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan. In total, 3,132 water samples from WSP and irrigated areas yielded 606,053 Culex larvae of five species. In addition...

Haplodiploidy is a sex determination system in which fertilized diploid eggs develop into females and unfertilized haploid eggs develop into males. The evolutionary explanations for this phenomenon include the possibility that haplodiploidy can be reinforced by infection with endosymbiotic bacteria, such as Wolbachia. The subfamily Scolytinae contains species with haplodiploid and diploid sex d...

The northern corn rootworm, Diabrotica barberi Smith & Lawrence (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) is an agricultural pest that ranges from the eastern Dakotas to Kansas and east to the Atlantic coast. The endosymbiotic bacteriaWolbachia has been detected in northern corn rootworm populations from east of the Mississippi River. Using theWolbachia 16S rDNA, ftsZ and wsp genes a boundary was identiÞed i...