Shigella flexneri contact with enterocytes induces a burst of protein secretion via its type III secretion apparatus (TTSA) as an initial step in cellular invasion. We have previously reported that IpaD is positioned at the TTSA needle tip (M. Espina et al., Infect. Immuno. 74:4391-4400, 2006). From this position, IpaD senses small molecules in the environment to control the presentation of Ipa...

OBJECTIVE to identify prevalence of compliance with the fourth step of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative - to put the babies in skin-to-skin contact with their mothers immediately after birth for at least half an hour - in a public hospital in Northeast Brazil. METHODS this was a cross-sectional study using data from interviews with mothers who had recently given birth during a typical we...

A rigorous foundation for the contact homology of Legendrian submanifolds in a contact manifold of the form P × R, where P is an exact symplectic manifold, is established. The class of such contact manifolds includes 1-jet spaces of smooth manifolds. As an application, contact homology is used to provide (smooth) isotopy invariants of submanifolds of Rn and, more generally, invariants of self t...

Kicking for distance in Australian Rules football is an important skill. Here, I examine technical aspects that contribute to achieving maximal kick distance. Twenty-eight elite players kicked for distance while being videoed at 500 Hz. Two-dimensional digitized data of nine body landmarks and the football were used to calculate kinematic parameters from kicking foot toe-off to the instant befo...

The paper deals with an iterative method for numerical solving frictionless contact problems for two elastic bodies. Each iterative step consists of a Dirichlet problem for the one body, a contact problem for the other one and two Neumann problems to coordinate contact stresses. Convergence is proved by the Banach fixed point theorem in both continuous and discrete case. Numerical experiments i...

A Failure Assessment Diagram (FAD), developed for rolling contact, was specifically formulated railway wheel steels. The FAD allows combining a multiaxial fatigue criterion with the linear elastic fracture mechanics concept; in particular, it used to assess failure wet related pressurization of fluid entrapped surface cracks. approach applied results previous bi-disc tests carried out on three ...

The rapid emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) worldwide presents a potential public health dilemma and potential epidemic due to lack of rapid, efficient and cost-effective point-of-contact screening. Establishing point-of-contact screening has been advocated by public health experts as a major step in control of exposure of the public to SARS. Urgent introduction of such a po...

ABSTRACT Motivation: Accurate prediction of protein contact maps is an important step in computational structural proteomics. Because contact maps provide a translation and rotation invariant topological representation of a protein, they can be used as a fundamental intermediary step in protein structure prediction. Results: We develop a new set of flexible machine learning architectures for th...