This research investigates spatio-temporal patterns of police calls-for-service in the Region of Waterloo, Canada, at a fine spatial and temporal resolution. Modeling was implemented via Bayesian Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA). Temporal patterns for two-hour time periods, spatial patterns at the small-area scale, and space-time interaction (i.e., unusual departures from overall ...

This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of Listeria monocytogenes on livestock farms in Korea and determine their serotypes and genetic correlations. Twenty-five livestock farms in Korea (central: 15, south west: 7, south east: 3) were visited 2-3 times, and 2,018 samples (feces: 677, soil: 680, silage: 647, sludge: 14) were collected. Samples were enriched in LEB (Listeria enrichment broth...

Two human faeces carriage isolates of Listeria monocytogenes (H1 and H2) were compared to reference strains (ScottA and LO28) with regard to their lethality in 14-day-old chick embryos, their haemolytic and phospholipase (phosphatidylcholine-phospholipase C and phosphatidylinositol-phospholipase C) activities and their invasiveness towards Caco-2 cells. Experimental infection of chick embryos a...

The introduction of Listeria monocytogenes into the food production chain is a concern, with numerous grouped cases of listeriosis associated with milk-derived or pork-derived products have been documented. Management of this zoonotic pathogen considers all strains as an equal risk. Recently, a new perspective for characterisation of strain virulence was introduced with the discovery of the una...

A total of 133 Listeria monocytogenes isolates were characterized by ribotyping and allelic analysis of the virulence genes hly, actA, and inlA to uncover linkages between independent phylogenetic and specific virulence markers. PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphisms revealed 8 hly, 11 inl4, and 2 actA alleles. The combination of these virulence gene alleles and ribotype patterns separat...

Longitudinal mortality data with few deaths usually have problems of zero-inflation. This paper presents and applies two Bayesian models which cater for zero-inflation, spatial and temporal random effects. To reduce the computational burden experienced when a large number of geo-locations are treated as a Gaussian field (GF) we transformed the field to a Gaussian Markov Random Fields (GMRF) by ...

Listeria monocytogenes is a model organism for cellular microbiology and host-pathogen interaction studies and an important food-borne pathogen widespread in the environment, thus representing an attractive model to study the evolution of virulence. The phylogenetic structure of L. monocytogenes was determined by sequencing internal portions of seven housekeeping genes (3,288 nucleotides) in 36...

Listeria monocytogenes is an intracellular Gram-positive bacterial pathogen that produces many types of surface proteins. To get insights into its intracellular lifestyle, we used high-resolution mass spectrometry to characterize the cell wall proteome of bacteria proliferating within the eukaryotic cell. The relative amount of a few surface proteins was found notoriously different in intracell...