BACKGROUND Acute rheumatic fever (ARF) and rheumatic heart disease (RHD) are responsible for a significant disease burden amongst Māori and Pacific populations in New Zealand (NZ). However, contemporary data are lacking regarding circulating group A Streptococcal (GAS) strains in NZ. Such information is important in guiding vaccine development. METHODS GAS isolates from April to June 2015 wer...

Educational Multimedia (EMM) is becoming a mature and integral part of teaching and learning systems, mainly due to its ability improve teaching and learning. However, EMM selection and evaluation for higher education is a complex and interdisciplinary problem characterised by uncertainty, dynamics, explicit and implicit knowledge and constraints, and involvement of different stakeholders. In t...

Exceptional Model Mining (EMM) generalizes the wellknown data mining task of Subgroup Discovery (SD). Given a model class of interest, the goal of EMM is to find subgroups of the data for which a model fitted to the subgroup deviates substantially from the global model. In both SD and EMM, heuristic search is often employed to circumvent the problem that exhaustive search of the subgroup descri...

The FCT regions of Streptococcus pyogenes strains encode a variety of cell wall-anchored surface proteins that bind the extracellular matrix of the human host and/or give rise to pilus-like appendages. Strong linkage is evident between transcription-regulatory loci positioned within the FCT and emm regions and the emm pattern genotype marker for preferred infection of the throat or skin. These ...

Six hundred fifteen isolates of Streptococcus pyogenes were collected over a 6-year period from patients with pharyngitis in Korea. All isolates were characterized in terms of their antibiotic resistance, the phenotypes of erythromycin resistance, the frequencies of erm(B), erm(A), and mef(A) genes, and the emm genotype. The prevalent emm genotypes were emm12 and emm4. Moreover, the emm12 genot...

BACKGROUND Group A streptococcus (GAS) causes invasive disease, superficial disease, and can asymptomatically colonize humans. Superantigens are one virulence factor found in GAS. Previous studies found associations between the genes that encode superantigens and emm type of GAS. It is unknown if these associations are due to underlying biological factors that limit the distribution of superant...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Group A streptococcal (GAS) pharyngitis, especially among children, leads to high prevalence of rheumatic fever (RF)/rheumatic heart disease (RHD) in India, as compared to the western world where invasive diseases are common. GAS encodes numerous virulence factors that cause diseases by exhibiting extraordinary biological diversity. Hence, we studied the virulence factor...

In an attempt to compare the epidemiology of severe Streptococcus pyogenes infection within Europe, prospective data were collected through the Strep-EURO program. Surveillance for severe cases of S. pyogenes infection diagnosed during 2003 and 2004 was undertaken in 11 countries across Europe by using a standardized case definition and questionnaire. Patient data as well as bacterial isolates ...

Breast cancer with bone metastasis accounts for serious cancer-associated pain which significantly reduces the quality of life affected patients and promotes progression. However, effective treatment using nanomedicine remains a formidable challenge owing to poor drug delivery efficiency multiple lesions inappropriate management pain. In this study, engineered macrophage membrane (EMM) drugs lo...

Using sequence analysis to detect variation within the hypervariable M protein N terminus, we found 41 emm types encompassing 81 subtypes, among 1064 consecutive invasive group A streptococcus isolates from a recent multistate, population-based surveillance. Seventeen of the 30 emm types represented by multiple isolates displayed multiple subtypes. Most subtypes differed from reference strain e...