Dps proteins, bacterial mini-ferritins that protect DNA from oxidative stress, are implicated in the survival and virulence of pathogenic bacteria. Here we examine the mechanism of E. coli Dps protection of DNA, specifically whether this DNA-binding protein can utilize DNA charge transport through the base pair π-stack to protect the genome from a distance. An intercalating ruthenium photooxida...

BACKGROUND The use of simplified methods for viral load determination could greatly increase access to treatment monitoring of HIV patients in resource-limited countries. OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to optimize and evaluate the performance of the Roche COBAS Taqman assay in HIV-RNA quantification from dried blood spots (DBS) and dried plasma spots (DPS). STUDY DESIGN EDTA blo...

Data and Previous Literature: Elliott (1971) points out that DPs introduced by emotive factive predicates (cf. (1)) have exclamative interpretations. Grimshaw (1979) establishes a parallelism between DPs that are introduced by predicates that also take interrogative clauses (Concealed Questions CQs, (2)) and DPs that are introduced by predicates that also take exclamative clauses (cf. (2b)); sh...

A starvation-inducible DNA-binding protein was discovered as a result of the analysis of proteins synthesized in 3-day-old cultures of Escherichia coli. This 19-kD protein, designated Dps, is abundant in starved cells. In vitro, Dps forms extremely stable complexes with DNA, without apparent sequence specificity. When complexed with Dps, DNA is rendered DNase resistant. Mutant cells lacking Dps...

Campylobacter jejuni enteritis is frequently associated with an axonal form of Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and C. jejuni DNA-binding protein from starved cells (C-Dps) induces paranodal myelin detachment and axonal degeneration through binding with sulfatide in vivo. Here we investigated the invasion of C-Dps into hosts with C. jejuni-related GBS. Our analyses of patient sera found that both ...

Although the role of iron in marine productivity has received a great deal of attention, no iron storage protein has been isolated from a marine microorganism previously. We describe an Fe-binding protein belonging to the Dps family (DNA binding protein from starved cells) in the N(2)-fixing marine cyanobacterium Trichodesmium erythraeum. A dps gene encoding a protein with significant levels of...

Dps is a multifunctional homododecameric protein that oxidizes Fe2+ ions accumulating them in the form of Fe2O3 within its protein cavity, interacts with DNA tightly condensing bacterial nucleoid upon starvation and performs some other functions. During the last two decades from discovery of this protein, its ferroxidase activity became rather well studied, but the mechanism of Dps interaction ...

Distributed Problem Solving (DPS) decomposes problems into subproblems to be solved by interacting, cooperative software agents. Thus, DPS is suitable for modeling, in the context of parallel and distributed architectures, the solving of problems characterized by many inter-dependencies among subproblems. Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) provides a powerful execution framework for DPS, w...

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods based on direct policy search (DPS) have been actively discussed to achieve an efficient approach to complicated Markov decision processes (MDPs). Although they have brought much progress in practical applications of RL, there still remains an unsolved problem in DPS related to model selection for the policy. In this paper, we propose a novel DPS method, weig...