Two component systems

BACKGROUND: Lone parents in high-income countries have high rates of poverty (including in-work poverty) and poor health. Employment requirements for these parents are increasingly common. 'Welfare-to-work' (WtW) interventions involving financial sanctions and incentives, training, childcare subsidies and lifetime limits on benefit receipt have been used to support or mandate employment among lone parents. These and other interventions that affect employment and income may also affect people's health, and it is important to understand the available evidence on these effects in lone parents...

Soil quality refers to the ability of soils to perform their functions well. The soils of the Harran Plain, Turkey, have been put into intensive crop production with the introduction of an irrigation scheme and become increasingly degraded due to unsustainable management and cropping systems that resulted in the loss of production potential. The goal of this study was to quantify the quality of common soil series in the Plain using soil quality indexes (SQI) and to compare SQIs of two long-term crop rotations, cotton and wheat-corn cultivation, and different soil types...

Near infrared model established under a certain condition can be applied to the new samples status, environmental conditions or instrument status through the model transfer. Spectral background correction and model update are two types of data process methods of NIR quantitative model transfer, and orthogonal signal regression (OSR) is a method based on spectra background correction, in which virtual standard spectra is used to fit a linear relation between master batches spectra and slave batches spectra, and map the slave batches spectra to the master batch spectra to realize the transfer of near infrared quantitative model...

Organisms have evolved strikingly parallel phenotypes in response to similar selection pressures suggesting that there may be shared constraints limiting the possible evolutionary trajectories. For example, the behavioral adaptation of specialist Drosophila species to specific host plants can exhibit parallel changes in their adult olfactory neuroanatomy. We investigated the genetic basis of these parallel changes by comparing gene expression during the development of the olfactory system of two specialist Drosophila species to that of four other generalist species...

TatA is an essential and structurally conserved component of all known Twin-arginine transport (Tat) machineries which are able to catalyse membrane transport of fully folded proteins. Here we have investigated if bacterial TatA, or chimeric pea/E. coli TatA derivatives, are capable of replacing thylakoidal TatA in function. While authentic E. coli TatA does not show any transport activity in thylakoid transport experiments, TatA chimeras comprising the transmembrane helix (TMH) of pea TatA are fully active...

BACKGROUND: There is robust clinical evidence to support offering early access to antiretroviral treatment (ART) to all HIV-positive individuals, irrespective of disease stage, to both improve patient health outcomes and reduce HIV incidence. However, as the global treatment guidelines shift to meet this evidence, it is still largely unknown if early access to ART for all (also referred to as "treatment as prevention" or "universal test and treat") is a feasible intervention in the resource-limited countries where this approach could have the biggest impact on the course of the HIV epidemics...

This research paper presents the results of tests on the colligative properties of konjac gum chains in water solutions. For this purpose, the measurements of osmotic pressure and intrinsic viscosity of aqueous solutions, in the function of konjac gum concentration and temperature were carried out. The applied methods allowed for the determination of the second osmotic virial coefficients B2, which raised with the increase of temperature. It indicate that increase of temperature causes higher affinity of polysaccharide's chains to water...

Mass spectrometry (MS) is known for its label-free detection of substrates and products from a variety of enzyme reactions. Recent hardware improvements have increased interest in the use of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) MS for high-throughput drug discovery. Despite interest in this technology, several challenges remain and must be overcome before MALDI-MS can be integrated as an automated "in-line reader" for high-throughput drug discovery. Two such hurdles include in situ sample processing and deposition, as well as integration of MALDI-MS for enzymatic screening assays that usually contain high levels of MS-incompatible components...

Herein, we report on a three-component supramolecular hybrid system built from specific recognition processes involving a Dawson type polyoxometalate [P2W18O62](6-,) a cationic electron-rich cluster {[Ta6Br12(H6O)6]@2CD}(2+) and γ-cyclodextrin. Investigations of such a class of materials have been conducted using bottom-up approach by studying the specific interactions between -CD and both types of inorganic units. Their ability to interact has been investigated in the solid state by single-crystal X-ray diffraction and in solution using multinuclear NMR methods (including DOSY, EXSY and COSY), ESI-mass and UV-vis spectroscopies, electrochemistry and ITC experiments...

Miscibility is an important issue in biopolymer blends for analysis of the behavior of polymer pairs through the detection of phase separation and improvement of the mechanical and physical properties of the blend. This study presents the formulation of a stable and one-phase mixture of collagen and regenerated silk fibroin (RSF), with the highest miscibility ratio between these two macromolecules, through inducing electrostatic interactions, using salt ions. For this aim, a ternary phase diagram was experimentally built for the mixtures, based on observations of phase behavior of blend solutions with various ratios...

Occurrence of pregnancy after in vitro fertilization depends of two components: functional adequacy of the embryo at the blastocyst stage and receptivity of endometrium, which, according to modern perception, are determinate in achieving optimal conditions of implantation. From the pregnancy occurrence point of view, as well as in regard to its further development , implantation is the most crucial phase of IVF/ICSI and ET. As the same time, this phase is also the most vulnerable. Multiple researches have proven the role of mother thrombophilia for genesis of gestation complications and early embryo losses, but in relation to this problem i the context of IVF there is still a lot to be detailed...

Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are monitored for health effects within the Life Span Study (LSS). The LSS results represent the most important source of data about cancer effects from ionizing radiation exposure, which forms the foundation for the radiation protection system. One uncertainty connected to deriving universal risk factors from these results is related to the problem of mixed radiation qualities. The A-bomb explosions generated a mixed beam of the sparsely ionizing gamma radiation and densely ionizing neutrons...

Brain-inspired neuromorphic systems have attracted much attention as new computing paradigms for power-efficient computation. Here, we report a silicon synaptic transistor with two electrically independent gates to realize a hardware-based neural network system without any switching components. The spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) characteristics of the synaptic devices are measured and analyzed. With the help of the device model based on the measured data, the pattern recognition capability of the hardware-based spiking neural network (SNN) systems is demonstrated using the modified national institute of standards and technology (MNIST) handwritten dataset...

INTRODUCTION: We report a case of a lost metal platelet from a radiofrequency ablation probe (VAPR VUE Radiofrequency System, Cool Pulse 90, DePuy, Synthes, Switzerland) in the shoulder joint during elective arthroscopic cuff repair. To the best of our knowledge, this kind of an incident during elective arthroscopy has not been described in the literature so far. In addition, we present an algorithm on how to deal with such an incident. CASE REPORT: A 69-year-old woman underwent an arthroscopic subacromial decompression and rotator cuff repair for a torn supraspinatus tendon...

To help us live in the three-dimensional world, our brain integrates incoming spatial information into reference frames, which are based either on our own body (egocentric) or independent from it (allocentric). Such frames, however, may be crucial not only when interacting with the visual world, but also in language comprehension, since even the simplest utterance can be understood from different perspectives. While significant progress has been made in elucidating how linguistic factors, such as pronouns, influence reference frame adoption, the neural underpinnings of this ability are largely unknown...

Individuals choose their mates so as to maximize reproductive success, and one important component of this choice is assessment of traits reflecting mate quality. Little is known about why specific traits are used for mate quality assessment nor about how they reflect it. We have previously shown that global manipulation of insulin signaling, a nutrient-sensing pathway governing investment in survival versus reproduction, affects female sexual attractiveness in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Here we demonstrate that these effects on attractiveness derive from insulin signaling in the fat body and ovarian follicle cells, whose signals are integrated by pheromone-producing cells called oenocytes...

Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesters often consist of a cantilevered beam composed of a support layer and one or two piezoelectric layers with a tip mass. While this configuration is advantageous for maximizing electromechanical coupling, the mechanical properties of the piezoelectric material can place limitations on harvester size and resonant frequency. Here, we present numerical and experimental results from a new type of piezoelectric energy harvester in which the mechanical properties and the resonant frequency of the cantilever beam resonator are effectively decoupled from the piezoelectric component...

Background Subacromial impingement syndrome poses a substantial socioeconomic burden, leading to significant consumption of healthcare. Health systems are calling for greater evidence of economic impacts of particular healthcare services. Telerehabilitation programmes have the potential to reduce costs and improve patient access as an alternative to traditional care. Cost analysis has been traditionally included in study protocols and results, although the reliability and research methodology have frequently been under debate...

Cytomixis, is a form of cell-to-cell nuclear migration that involves the interaction of dynamic cytoskeletal components with the nucleus through signalling systems and linker complexes. In cytomixis two known mechanisms can be involved: actomyosin and/or microtubules and their associated motors. Perinuclear actin anchors and determines the direction of nuclear movement. In microsporogenesis cytomixis is probably initiated by a cascade of signals that trigger prophase reorganization of nucleus and cytoskeleton, and is a result of cytoskeletal protein activation, as well as a weakening of mechanisms responsible for anchoring the nucleus...

In this chapter we present an alternative method to develop marker-free transgenic plants. It makes use of the Cre/loxP recombination system from bacteriophage P1 and consists of two essential components. The first component is the transgenic plant containing a loxP-flanked marker gene. The second component is a cre transient expression vector based on potato virus X. The great benefit of this transient delivery method consists in the avoidance of stable integration of the cre recombinase gene into the plant genome...