colony characteristics of isolates were noted, including haemolysis on blood agar and texture (smooth, rough, mucoid) on Tergitol-7 agar, for routine diagnostic procedures. Infections were considered to be potentially dual or multiple when colonies with different haemolytic patterns or morphology were observed on one plate. For each culture, all isolates with different phenotypes were selected ...

Enterohemorragic Escherichia coli strains (EHEC) represent an important problem for public health in developed countries. Indeed, EHEC strains can infect humans via vegetal and animal food consumption and cause food poisoning with diarrhoeas, frequently accompanied by hemorrhagic colitis with, in 10 % of the cases, apparition of renal sequelae (Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome) that can lead to deat...

The synergy between the reflected solar spectrum (Visible Near Infrared/ Short Wave Infrared or VSWIR) and the emitted spectrum (Thermal Infrared or TIR) for identifying plant species’ foliar chemistry has been largely unexplored. In the 2013 spring and summer seasons, fresh leaves from sixteen common shrub and tree species were sampled from locations ranging from the Sierra Nevada mountains, t...

Background: Infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7 rarely leads to bloody diarrhea and causes hemolytic uremic syndrome with renal failure that can be deadly dangerous. Intimin, translocated Intimin receptor (Tir), and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) secreted protein A (EspA) proteins are the virulence factors expressed by locus of enterocyte effacement locus of EHEC. This bacterium needs Es...

This paper describes the overview of NTCIR-11 Temporal Information Access (Temporalia) task. This pilot task aims to foster research in temporal aspects of information retrieval and search. Temporalia is composed of two subtasks: Temporal Query Intent Classification (TQIC) and Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) subtask. TQIC attracted 6 teams which submitted a total of 17 runs, while 6 teams ...

Finite-length delay-optimized multi-input multi-output (MIMO) equalizers that optimally shorten the impulse response memory of frequency-selective MIMO channels are derived. The MIMO equalizers are designed to minimize the average energy of the error sequence between the equalized MIMO channel impulse response and an MIMO target impulse response (TIR) with shorter memory. Two criteria for optim...

Type 3 secretion systems (T3SSs) are utilized by pathogenic Escherichia coli to infect their hosts and many proteins from these systems are affected by chaperones specific to T3SS-containing bacteria. Toward developing a recombinant vaccine against enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), we expressed recombinant T3SS and related proteins from predominant EHEC serotypes in Nicotiana chloroplasts. Nic...

We present TIR-PTD spectroscopy, an IR-pump/VIS-probe method for the measurement of IR absorption spectra by means of photothermal deflectometry (PTD) enhanced by total internal reflection (TIR). It overcomes the limitations of IR spectroscopy for the study of opaque samples and allows molecular fingerprinting of IR-active liquids or solids. Another important advantage of the presented approach...

Total internal reflection (TIR) is useful for interrogating physical and chemical processes that occur at the interface between two transparent media. Yet prism-coupled TIR imaging microscopes suffer from limited sensing areas due to the fact that the interface (the object plane) is not perpendicular to the optical axis of the microscope. In this paper, we show that an electrically tunable lens...

The immunovariant N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea-induced mutations Pococurante (Poc) and Lackadaisical were found to alter MyD88, creating striking receptor-selective effects. Poc, in particular, prevented sensing of all MyD88-dependent Toll-like receptor (TLR) ligands except diacyl lipopeptides. Furthermore, Poc-site and classical BB loop mutations caused equivalent phenotypes when engrafted into any T...