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Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) is a gram-negative bacterial pathogen that adheres to intestinal epithelial cells, causing diarrhoea. It constitutes a significant risk to human health and remains an important cause of infant mortality in developing countries. Although EPEC was the first E. coli strain to be implicated in human disease in the 1940s and 1950s, the mechanisms by which this pathogen induced diarrhoea remained a complete mystery throughout most of the 40 years since its description. It was only during the late 1980s that major advances were made in unravelling the mechanisms behind EPEC pathogenesis. Ever since, progress has been made at a stunning pace and there have been major breakthroughs in identifying the bacterial factors involved in attaching and effacing (A/E) lesion formation, host signal transduction pathways in response to EPEC infection and the genetic basis of EPEC pathogenesis. The rapid pace of discovery is a result of intensive research by investigators in this field and portends that EPEC will soon be among one of the most understood diarrhoea-causing infectious agents. This review aims to trace the progress of EPEC research since its existence was first reported by John Bray in 1945, highlighting the major findings that have revolutionised our understanding of EPEC pathogenesis.

Background. There are many possible ways to treat verruca, but no one is the single perfect treatment. YIKEER is a kind of compound preparation of Chinese traditional medicine, which has been used in the treatment of verruca for several years. Aim. To confirm the effects of YIKEER for verruca. Method. Patients with verruca vulgaris, verruca plantaris, or verruca plana were instructed to apply YIKEER stock solution or diluent to the lesions once or twice daily for 5–7 days. Then, the YIKEER was ceased for 3–4 days, and sea buckthorn oil was used for wound repairing. The total procession was defined as one session. Result. Respective 88.05% verruca vulgaris patients, 86.03% verruca plantaris patients, and 82.42% verruca plana patients achieved complete response. Most patients gained complete or partial responses after 4 treatment sessions. The percentage of patients who achieved at least 50% improvement was 90.34% for verruca vulgaris, 90.60% for verruca plantaris, and 80.91% for verruca plana after 4-session treatment. The efficacy of verruca vulgaris or verruca plantaris was better than that of verruca plana. Conclusion. YIKEER is an effective, safe, and well-tolerated agent for treating verruca including verruca vulgaris, verruca plantaris, and verruca plana.

Aiming at the optimization problem of micro-grid energy dispatch, the environmental benefit, system operation and maintenance cost, start-stop cost and main grid electricity price are proposed as the objective function, and the influence of the actual operation constraints of micro-grid system and the distributed non-scheduled new energy are taken into account at the same time. The multi-objective optimal dispatching model of microgrid is constructed, and the model is solved based on improved genetic algorithm. The numerical simulation results show that compared with the traditional single-target scheduling method of microgrid, the optimal scheduling method of this paper is beneficial to the micro-grid in the process of scheduling decision-making to achieve the overall coordination of economic, environmental and social benefits of microgrid.

This study presents a compact coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed slot antenna design with dual-band operation for WLAN and WiMAX applications. To achieve wide 10 dB bandwidth for the lower operating band, the technique of applying a square-ring slot antenna type with an asymmetric ground plane was used herein, and a broad upper operating band was attained by introducing a stub-protruded monopole and loading a double-bent stub into one of the asymmetric CPW ground planes. The process of designing the proposed antenna is explicitly shown, and parametric studies were carried out by simulation. Typical experimental measurements were also conducted and compared with the simulated results.

Temperature gradient capillary electrophoresis (TGCE) can be used to distinguish heteroduplex from homoduplex DNA molecules and can thus be applied to the detection of various types of DNA polymorphisms. Unlike most single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) detection technologies, TGCE can be used even in the absence of prior knowledge of the sequences of the underlying polymorphisms. TGCE is both sensitive and reliable in detecting SNPs, small InDel (insertion/deletion) polymorphisms (IDPs) and simple sequence repeats, and using this technique it is possible to detect a single SNP in amplicons of over 800 bp and 1-bp IDPs in amplicons of approximately 500 bp. Genotyping data obtained via TGCE are consistent with data obtained via gel-based detection technologies. For genetic mapping experiments, TGCE has a number of advantages over alternative heteroduplex-detection technologies such as celery endonuclease (CELI) and denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (dHPLC). Multiplexing can increase TGCE's throughput to 12 markers on 94 recombinant inbreds per day. Given its ability to efficiently and reliably detect a variety of subtle DNA polymorphisms that occur at high frequency in genes, TGCE shows great promise for discovering polymorphisms and conducting genetic mapping and genotyping experiments.

The future development of radio frequency (RF) and microwave technology and its successful application to modern systems depend on the development and utilization of 3-dimensional subsystem integration techniques. These techniques must respond to the needs of the marketplace for more functionality in less volume and at lower cost. Low temperature cofired ceramic on metal (LTCC-M) is believed to be one of the best approaches to meeting these goals. The LTCC-M technology is discussed.

Bacteriophages typically have small genomes 1 and depend on their bacterial hosts for replication 2 . Here we sequenced DNA from diverse ecosystems and found hundreds of phage genomes with lengths of more than 200 kilobases (kb), including a genome of 735 kb, which is—to our knowledge—the largest phage genome to be described to date. Thirty-five genomes were manually curated to completion (circular and no gaps). Expanded genetic repertoires include diverse and previously undescribed CRISPR–Cas systems, transfer RNAs (tRNAs), tRNA synthetases, tRNA-modification enzymes, translation-initiation and elongation factors, and ribosomal proteins. The CRISPR–Cas systems of phages have the capacity to silence host transcription factors and translational genes, potentially as part of a larger interaction network that intercepts translation to redirect biosynthesis to phage-encoded functions. In addition, some phages may repurpose bacterial CRISPR–Cas systems to eliminate competing phages. We phylogenetically define the major clades of huge phages from human and other animal microbiomes, as well as from oceans, lakes, sediments, soils and the built environment. We conclude that the large gene inventories of huge phages reflect a conserved biological strategy, and that the phages are distributed across a broad bacterial host range and across Earth’s ecosystems. Genomic analyses of major clades of huge phages sampled from across Earth’s ecosystems show that they have diverse genetic inventories, including a variety of CRISPR–Cas systems and translation-relevant genes.

An efficient Agrobacterium-mediated durum wheat transformation system has been developed for the production of 121 independent transgenic lines. This improved system used Agrobacterium strain AGL1 containing the superbinary pGreen/pSoup vector system and durum wheat cv Stewart as the recipient plant. Acetosyringone at 400 μM was added to both the inoculation and cultivation medium, and picloram at 10 mg l⁻¹ and 2 mg l⁻¹ was used in the cultivation and induction medium, respectively. Compared with 200 μM in the inoculation and cultivation media, the increased acetosyringone concentration led to significantly higher GUS (β-glucuronidase) transient expression and T-DNA delivery efficiency. However, no evident effects of acetosyringone concentration on regeneration frequency were observed. The higher acetosyringone concentration led to an improvement in average final transformation efficiency from 4.7% to 6.3%. Furthermore, the concentration of picloram in the co-cultivation medium had significant effects on callus induction and regeneration. Compared with 2 mg l⁻¹ picloram in the co-cultivation medium, increasing the concentration to 10 mg l⁻¹ picloram resulted in improved final transformation frequency from 2.8% to 6.3%, with the highest frequency of 12.3% reached in one particular experiment, although statistical analysis showed that this difference in final transformation efficiency had a low level of significance. Stable integration of foreign genes, their expression, and inheritance were confirmed by Southern blot analyses, GUS assay, and genetic analysis. Analysis of T₁ progeny showed that, of the 31 transgenic lines randomly selected, nearly one-third had a segregation ratio of 3:1, while the remainder had ratios typical of two or three independently segregating loci.

Background: Controversy remains regarding the relationship between ambient ozone and mortality worldwide. In mainland China, the largest developing country, there has been no prior study investigating the acute effect of O 3 on death risk. Given the changes in types of air pollution from conventional coal combustion to the mixed coal combustion/motor vehicle emissions in China's large cities, it is worthwhile to investigate the acute effect of O 3 on mortality outcomes in the country. Objectives: We conducted a time-series study to investigate the relation between O 3 and daily mortality in Shanghai using 4 years of daily data (2001-2004). Methods: We used the generalized additive model with penalized splines to analyze mortality, O 3 pollution, and covariate data in warm and cold seasons. We considered daily counts of all-cause mortality and several cause-specific subcategories (respiratory and cardiovascular). We also examined these associations among several subpopulations based on age and sex. Results: O 3 was significantly associated with total and cardiovascular mortality in the cold season but not in the warm season. In the whole-year analysis, an increase of $10 \\mu g/m^3$ of 2-day average (lag01) O 3 corresponds to 0.45% [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.16-0.73%], 0.53% (95% CI, 0.10-0.96%), and 0.35% (95% CI, -0.40 to 1.09%) increase of total nonaccidental, cardiovascular, and respiratory mortality, respectively. In the cold season, the estimates increased to 1.38% (95% CI, 0.68-2.07%), 1.53% (95% CI, 0.54-2.52%), and 0.95% (95% CI, -0.71 to 2.60%), respectively. In the warm season, we did not observe significant associations for both total and cause-specific mortality. The results were generally insensitive to model specifications such as lag structure of O 3 concentrations and degree of freedom for time trend. Multipollutant models indicate that the effect of O 3 was not confounded by particulate matter $\\leq 10 \\mu m$ in diameter (PM 10 ) or by sulfur dioxide; however, after adding nitrogen dioxide into the model, the association of O 3 with total and cardiovascular mortality became statistically insignificant. Conclusions: O 3 pollution has stronger health effects in the cold than in the warm season in Shanghai. Our analyses also strengthen the rationale for further limiting levels of O 3 pollution in outdoor air in the city.

The yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus grows at high temperatures and on a wide range of carbon sources, making it a promising host for industrial biotechnology to produce renewable chemicals from plant biomass feedstocks. However, major genetic engineering limitations have kept this yeast from replacing the commonly used yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in industrial applications. Here, we describe genetic tools for genome editing and breeding K. marxianus strains, which we use to create a new thermotolerant strain with promising fatty acid production. These results open the door to using K. marxianus as a versatile synthetic biology platform organism for industrial applications. Throughout history, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has played a central role in human society due to its use in food production and more recently as a major industrial and model microorganism, because of the many genetic and genomic tools available to probe its biology. However, S. cerevisiae has proven difficult to engineer to expand the carbon sources it can utilize, the products it can make, and the harsh conditions it can tolerate in industrial applications. Other yeasts that could solve many of these problems remain difficult to manipulate genetically. Here, we engineered the thermotolerant yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus to create a new synthetic biology platform. Using CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats with Cas9)-mediated genome editing, we show that wild isolates of K. marxianus can be made heterothallic for sexual crossing. By breeding two of these mating-type engineered K. marxianus strains, we combined three complex traits—thermotolerance, lipid production, and facile transformation with exogenous DNA—into a single host. The ability to cross K. marxianus strains with relative ease, together with CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, should enable engineering of K. marxianus isolates with promising lipid production at temperatures far exceeding those of other fungi under development for industrial applications. These results establish K. marxianus as a synthetic biology platform comparable to S. cerevisiae , with naturally more robust traits that hold potential for the industrial production of renewable chemicals. IMPORTANCE The yeast Kluyveromyces marxianus grows at high temperatures and on a wide range of carbon sources, making it a promising host for industrial biotechnology to produce renewable chemicals from plant biomass feedstocks. However, major genetic engineering limitations have kept this yeast from replacing the commonly used yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in industrial applications. Here, we describe genetic tools for genome editing and breeding K. marxianus strains, which we use to create a new thermotolerant strain with promising fatty acid production. These results open the door to using K. marxianus as a versatile synthetic biology platform organism for industrial applications.