The Agrobacterium tumefaciens VirB proteins are postulated to form a transport pore for the transfer of T-DNA. Formation of the transport pore will involve interactions among the VirB proteins. A powerful genetic method to study protein-protein interaction is the yeast two-hybrid assay. To test whether this method can be used to study interactions among the VirB membrane proteins, we studied th...

The intracellular pathogen Brucella is the causative agent of brucellosis, a worldwide zoonosis that affects mammals, including humans. Essential to Brucella virulence is its ability to survive and replicate inside host macrophages, yet the underlying mechanisms and the nature of the replicative compartment remain unclear. Here we show in a model of Brucella abortus infection of murine bone mar...

There are 12.8 million children worldwide who are visually impaired due to uncorrected refractive error (URE)1, the leading cause of visual impairment among children wherever the problem has been studied.2 Half of these children live in China1, where the total number with URE may reach 100 million by 2020.3 The prevalence of myopia, the most common refractive error, is growing rapidly in childr...

Client disks ure a valuable resource that ure not adequately exploited by current client-server ciatabase systems. In this papeG we propose the use of client disks for caching database pages in an extended cache architecture. We describe four algorithms .fi)r managing disk caches and investigate the tradeoffs inherent in keeping a large volume of disk-cached data consistent using u detailed sim...

The behavior and performance of denoising algorithms are governed by one or several parameters, whose optimal settings depend on the content of the processed image and the characteristics of the noise, and are generally designed to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the denoised image returned by the algorithm and a virtual ground truth. In this paper, we introduce a new Poisson-Gaus...