Symbiotic relationships between hosts and bacteria are common in nature, and these may be responsible for the evolutionary success of various groups of animals. Among ants, these associations have been well studied in some genera of the Camponotini, but several questions remain regarding the generality of the previous findings across all the members of this ant tribe and if bacterial communitie...

In order to obtain accurate and reliable network planning in the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) communication system, the locations of readers and the associated values for each of the reader parameters have to be determined. All these choices must optimize a set of objectives, such as tag coverage, economic efficiency, load balance, and interference level between readers. This paper pro...

Bacterial meningitis has a poor prognosis and neurologic complications. The present study aimed to investigate the cytokine/chemokine network in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from children with bacterial meningitis and aseptic meningitis. Interleukin (IL)-1beta, IL-2, IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, IL-7, IL-8, IL-10, IL-12, IL-13, IL-17, interferon-gamma, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, granulocyte colony-stimulat...

The rate of expansion of bacterial colonies of S. liquefaciens is investigated in terms of a mathematical model that combines biological as well as hydrodynamic processes. The relative importance of cell differentiation and production of an extracellular wetting agent to bacterial swarming is explored using a continuum representation. The model incorporates aspects of thin film flow with variab...

Title of Thesis: In Vivo Evaluation of Contemporary Endodontic Antimicrobial Procedures Peter Bellingham, Master of Science, 2011 Thesis Directed by: Dr. Ashraf F. Fouad, Professor and Chairman, Director of Postgraduate Endodontics, University of Maryland School of Dentistry Introduction: Clinical assessment of the efficacy of novel root canal disinfection protocols is an important focus in end...

The role of motility and nutrients in bacterial competition and colony formation Bacterial competition and colony formation are an important component in many practical applications such as plant roots colonization and medicine (especially in dental clinics). Motility is a pivotal bacterial trait for the successful colonization of plant roots. Bacterial motility has two types of mechanisms — di...

Greater care and a more thorough approach to intravenous catheter site disinfection may be important for the prevention of catheter related sepsis, especially with coagulase negative staphylocci in preterm infants. The efficacy of skin disinfection was evaluated in preterm infants using a skin swabbing technique after disinfectant exposure. In the first part of the study, 25 peripheral intravas...

Melanized yeast-like meristematic fungi are characteristic inhabitants of highly stressed environments and are rare eukaryotic extremophiles. Therefore, they are attractive organisms for studies of adaptations. In this study we compared two meristematic species of the genus Trimmatostroma on media of differing water potentials isolated from distinct water-stressed environments: T. salinum from ...

Bacterial colony enumeration is an essential tool for many widely used biomedical assays. However, bacterial colony enumerating is a low throughput, time consuming and labor intensive process since there may exist hundreds or thousands of colonies on a Petri dish, and the counting process is usually manually performed by well-trained technicians. In this paper, we introduce a fully automatic ye...