The fusion (F) and haemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) proteins of Newcastle disease virus (NDV) are multifunctional proteins that play critical roles during infection. Here, we assessed the ability of NDV to replicate in macrophages and investigated the contribution of the F and HN proteins to NDV infection/replication in these cells. Results of our study revealed that, while presenting similar ...

Functional analysis of newly identified genes has become a major part of genomic projects and will obviously become important for gene discovery and annotation of the recently sequenced chicken genome. Mutagenesis and transgenic approaches have become routine for functional genomic studies in species such as mice (Okabe et al., 1997), zebrafish (Gong et al., 2002) and drosophila (Link, 2002), h...

Previous analyses on the gauge invariance of the action for a generally covariant system are generalized. It is shown that if the action principle is properly improved, there is as much gauge freedom at the endpoints for an arbitrary gauge system as there is for a system with “internal” gauge symmetries. The key point is to correctly identify the boundary conditions for the allowed histories an...

OSCAR is a fully implemented architecture for a cognitive agent, based largely on the author’s work in philosophy concerning epistemology and practical cognition. The seminal idea is that a generally intelligent agent must be able to function in an environment in which it is ignorant of most matters of fact. The architecture incorporates a general-purpose defeasible reasoner, built on top of an...