OBJECTIVE To estimate the global cost of establishing and operating the educational and refractive care facilities required to provide care to all individuals who currently have vision impairment resulting from uncorrected refractive error (URE). METHODS The global cost of correcting URE was estimated using data on the population, the prevalence of URE and the number of existing refractive ca...

The phototrophic nonsulfur purple bacterium Rhodobacter capsulatus can use urea as a sole source of nitrogen. Three transposon Tn5-induced mutations (Xan-9, Xan-10, and Xan-19), which led to a Ure(-) phenotype, were mapped to the ureF and ureC genes, whereas two other Tn5 insertions (Xan-20 and Xan-22) were located within the ntrC and ntrB genes, respectively. As in Klebsiella aerogenes and oth...

Long terminal repeats of feline leukemia viruses cloned from feline acute myeloid leukemias frequently contained direct repeats of 40 to 74 bp in the upstream region of the enhancer (URE). The repetitive URE conferred an enhancer function upon gene expression in myeloid cells, suggesting its association with tumorigenic potential in myeloid cells.

Aren’t bugs a source of continuous amazement? Consider, for example, how cunningly bacteria conspire to shanghai the molecular machines of their mammalian hosts for their own goals. Besides serving the bugs, this evil intelligence is exploitable for studying cellular physiology, and the bewildering affinity of bacterial toxins for crucial host cell proteins has taught us many a thing on how cel...

The VirB proteins of Agrobacterium tumefaciens assemble a T-pilus and a type IV secretion (T4S) apparatus for the transfer of DNA and proteins to plant cells. VirB6 is essential for DNA transfer and is a polytopic integral membrane protein with at least four membrane-spanning domains. VirB6 is postulated to function in T-pilus biogenesis and to be a component of the T4S apparatus. To identify a...

BACKGROUND To investigate the prevalence and risk factors of undercorrected refractive error (URE) among people with diabetes in the Baoshan District of Shanghai, where data for undercorrected refractive error are limited. METHODS The study was a population-based survey of 649 persons (aged 60 years or older) with diabetes in Baoshan, Shanghai in 2009. One copy of the questionnaire was comple...

Benefiting from their unique physicochemical properties, graphene derivatives have attracted great attention in biomedicine. In this study, we carefully engineered graphene oxide (GO) as a vaccine adjuvant for immunotherapy using urease B (Ure B) as the model antigen. Ure B is a specific antigen for Helicobacter pylori, which is a class I carcinogen for gastric cancer. Polyethylene glycol (PEG)...