Glucose, enzymatically released from pulp fiber sludge, was combined with inorganic salts and used as a growth medium for Alcaligenes eutrophus, a gram-negative strain producing poly (3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB). By controlling the concentrations of the inorganic salts in the growth medium, almost 78% of the cell mass was converted to pure PHB. Efforts were made to find conditions for bacterial growt

Aim: To explore the association between the coagulation protein fibrinogen and the fibrinolytic biomarker plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 ( PAI- 1) and the long- term mortality after coronary artery bypass grafting ( CABG). Patients and Methods: In 729 patients undergoing CABG at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, a blood sample for fibrinogen and PAI-1 was collected prior to the procedure. Patien

Patient-reported health status questionnaires intend to assess illness and therapy from the patients' perspective. To provide fair and valid assessments, they should be equally relevant to major subsets of respondents. Furthermore, disease-specific measures are assumed to be perceived as more relevant than generic ones. This study assessed these assumptions among people with Parkinson's disease. C

A human papillomavirus (HPV) was cloned from a patient with multiple squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) and identified as HPV88, recently categorized into a new species within the genus Gamma. The HPV88 viral load in an SCC of the index patient exceeded 1 million copies/cell. By contrast, a survey of 447 skin lesions (79 actinic keratoses, 73 seborrhoeic keratoses, 169 basal cell carcinomas and 126 S

A multifunctional NEMS platform based on a mass-producible, surface relief grating has been developed and fabricated directly in polymer materials. The pattern consists of high aspect ratio interdigitated nanometer-sized pairs of walls and can be produced in a low-complexity one-step patterning process with nanoimprint lithography. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of the platform prima

Methods for increasing the proteolytic stability of EFK17 (EFKRIVQRIKDFLRNLV), a new peptide sequence with antimicrobial properties derived from LL-37, were evaluated. EFK17 was modified by four d-enantiomer or tryptophan ( W) substitutions at known protease cleavage sites as well as by terminal amidation and acetylation. The peptide variants were studied in terms of proteolytic resistance, antiba

The highly specific relationships between parallel fiber (PF) and climbing fiber (CF) receptive fields in Purkinje cells and interneurons suggest that normal PF receptive fields are established by CF-specific plasticity. To test this idea, we used PF stimulation that was either paired or unpaired with CF activity. Conspicuously, unpaired PF stimulation that induced long-lasting, very large increas

All the support tools that developers are used to must be in place, if the use of model-centric development in companies hits to take off. Industry deals with big models and many people working on the same model. Collaboration in a team inevitably leads to parallel work creating different versions that eventually will have to be merged together. However, our experience is that at present the suppo

A widely used estimate claims that one per thousand individuals is deaf, but few recent studies exist on the actual prevalence. The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of deaf people, defined as deaf individuals who use sign language as their main mode of communication, in the county of Scania, Sweden. To achieve high validity, data were collected from a large variety of sources in

One of the most ubiquitous phenomena of all natural populations is their variability in numbers in space and time. However, there are notable differences among populations in the way the population size fluctuates. One of the major challenges in population and community ecology is to explain and understand this variety and to find possible underlying rules that might be modified from case-to-case.

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of the degree of difficulty and quality of hernia repair, as perceived by the surgeon, and operative time on the reoperation rate. All hernia repairs performed during the period 1994-1995 at the Department of Surgery, University Hospital of Lund, Sweden, were recorded prospectively. The degree of difficulty and the degree of difficulty in relation to

Objective: It is not known why acute pancreatitis in Soweto, South Africa, pursues an aggressive course. We sought clues from circulating trypsinogen load at admission as marker of initial acinar injury, trypsinogen activation using the carboxypeptidase B activation peptide as surrogate, proteinase inhibitors, the coagulation-fibrinolysis axis, indicators of inflammation, oxidative stress markers,

Collagen-induced arthritis in mice is one of the most commonly used autoimmune experimental models, with many similarities to rheumatoid arthritis. Since collagen-induced arthritis is a complex polygenic disease there is a need for identification of several major disease-controlling genes. Because rheumatoid arthritis particularly affects aged women, we have in the present study identified new gen

Neurocan is a component of the extracellular matrix in brain. Due to its inhibition of neuronal adhesion and outgrowth in vitro and its expression pattern in vivo it was suggested to play an important role in axon guidance and neurite growth. To study the role of neurocan in brain development we generated neurocan-deficient mice by targeted disruption of the neurocan gene. These mice are viable an

Mutations in the genes that code for collagen VI subunits, COL6A1, COL6A2, and COL6A3, are the cause of the dominantly inherited disorder, Bethlem myopathy. Glycine mutations that interrupt the Gly-X-Y repetitive amino acid sequence that forms the characteristic collagen triple helix have been defined in four families; however, the effects of these mutations on collagen VI biosynthesis, assembly,

As the use of WLANs based on IEEE 802.11 increases, the need for QoS becomes more obvious. The new IEEE 802.1 le standard aims at providing QoS, but its contention-based medium access mechanism, EDCA, provides only service differentiation, i.e. soft QoS. In order to provide hard QoS, earlier we have proposed an extension called EDCA with resource reservation (EDCA/RR), which enhances EDCA by offer