bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Actinomyces Species Isolated from Breast Infections
Authors: Bing A. U. , Loh S. F. , Morris T. , Hughes H. , Dixon J. M. , Helgason K. O. 
Published: July 2015

ABSTRACT

Actinomycosis is a chronic infection caused by
Actinomyces
species characterized by abscess formation, tissue fibrosis, and draining sinuses. The spectrum of infections caused by
Actinomyces
species ranges from classical invasive actinomycosis to a less invasive form of superficial skin and soft tissue infection. We present a review detailing all
Actinomyces
species isolated from breast infections in NHS Lothian between 2005 and 2013,
Actinomyces
species isolated from breast infections referred to the United Kingdom Anaerobe Reference Unit between 1988 and 2014, and cases describing
Actinomyces
breast infections published in the medical literature since 1994.
Actinomyces
species are fastidious organisms which can be difficult to identify and are likely to be underascertained as a cause of breast infections. Due to improved diagnostic methods, they are increasingly associated with chronic, recurrent breast infections and may play a more significant role in these infections than has previously been appreciated.
Evaluation of Two Phenotypic Screening Tests for Carbapenemase-Producing Enterobacteriaceae
Authors: Pantel Alix , Souzy Dimitri , Sotto Albert , Lavigne Jean-Philippe 
Published: July 2015

ABSTRACT

We evaluated the performance of two rapid tests for detection of carbapenemase-producing
Enterobacteriaceae
(CPE) strains. The sensitivities and the specificities were 97.6% and 94.4% for the Rapid CARB Screen and 98.8% and 93.1% for the KPC/MBL & OXA-48 Confirm tests, providing the usefulness of these tools for screening CPE in microbiology wards.
Antagonistic Relationship between Human Cytomegalovirus pUL27 and pUL97 Activities during Infection
Authors: Bigley Tarin M. , Reitsma Justin M. , Terhune Scott S. 
Published: July 2015

ABSTRACTHuman cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a member of the betaherpesvirus family. During infection, an array of viral proteins manipulates the host cell cycle. We have previously shown that expression of HCMV pUL27 results in increased levels of the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) inhibitor p21Cip1. In addition, pUL27 is necessary for the full antiviral activity of the pUL97 kinase inhibitor maribavir (MBV). The purpose of this study was to define the relationship between pUL27 and pUL97 and its role in MBV antiviral activity. We observed that expression of wild-type but not kinase-inactive pUL97 disrupted pUL27-dependent induction of p21Cip1. Furthermore, pUL97 associated with and promoted the phosphorylation of pUL27. During infection, inhibition of the kinase resulted in elevated levels of p21Cip1in wild-type virus but not a pUL27-deficient virus. We manipulated the p21Cip1levels to evaluate the functional consequence to MBV. Overexpression of p21Cip1restored MBV activity against a pUL27-deficient virus, while disruption reduced activity against wild-type virus. We provide evidence that the functional target of p21Cip1in the context of MBV activity is CDK1. One CDK-like activity of pUL97 is to phosphorylate nuclear lamin A/C, resulting in altered nuclear morphology and increased viral egress. In the presence of MBV, we observed that infection using a pUL27-deficient virus still altered the nuclear morphology. This was prevented by the addition of a CDK inhibitor. Overall, our results demonstrate an antagonistic relationship between pUL27 and pUL97 activities centering on p21Cip1and support the idea that CDKs can complement some activities of pUL97.IMPORTANCEHCMV infection results in severe disease upon immunosuppression and is a leading cause of congenital birth defects. Effective antiviral compounds exist, yet they exhibit high levels of toxicity, are not approved for use during pregnancy, and can result in antiviral resistance. Our studies have uncovered new information regarding the antiviral efficacy of the HCMV pUL97 kinase inhibitor MBV as it relates to the complex interplay between pUL97 and a second HCMV protein, pUL27. We demonstrate that pUL97 functions antagonistically against pUL27 by phosphorylation-dependent inactivation of pUL27-mediated induction of p21Cip1. In contrast, we provide evidence that p21Cip1functions to antagonize overlapping activities between pUL97 and cellular CDKs. In addition, these studies further support the notion that CDK inhibitors or p21Cip1activators might be useful in combination with MBV to effectively inhibit HCMV infections.
Inhibition of HIV Expression and Integration in Macrophages by Methylglyoxal-Bis-Guanylhydrazone
Authors: Jin Xia , McGrath Michael S. , Xu Hua 
Published: July 2015

ABSTRACTMacrophages are a target for infection with HIV and represent one of the viral reservoirs that are relatively resistant to current antiretroviral drugs. Here we demonstrate that methylglyoxal-bis-guanylhydrazone (MGBG), a polyamine analog and potentS-adenosylmethionine decarboxylase inhibitor, decreases HIV expression in monocytes and macrophages. MGBG is selectively concentrated by these cells through a mechanism consistent with active transport by the polyamine transporter. Using a macrophage-tropic reporter virus tagged with the enhanced green fluorescent protein, we demonstrate that MGBG decreases the frequency of HIV-infected cells. The effect is dose dependent and correlates with the production of HIV p24 in culture supernatants. This anti-HIV effect was further confirmed using three macrophage-tropic primary HIV isolates. Viral life cycle mapping studies show that MGBG inhibits HIV DNA integration into the cellular DNA in both monocytes and macrophages.IMPORTANCEOur work demonstrates for the first time the selective concentration of MGBG by monocytes/macrophages, leading to the inhibition of HIV-1 expression and a reduction in proviral load within macrophage cultures. These results suggest that MGBG may be useful in adjunctive macrophage-targeted therapy for HIV infection.
Trigger Enzymes: Coordination of Metabolism and Virulence Gene Expression
Authors: Commichau Fabian M. , Stülke Jörg 
Published: July 2015

ABSTRACT
Virulence gene expression serves two main functions, growth in/on the host, and the acquisition of nutrients. Therefore, it is obvious that nutrient availability is important to control expression of virulence genes. In any cell, enzymes are the components that are best informed about the availability of their respective substrates and products. It is thus not surprising that bacteria have evolved a variety of strategies to employ this information in the control of gene expression. Enzymes that have a second (so-called moonlighting) function in the regulation of gene expression are collectively referred to as trigger enzymes. Trigger enzymes may have a second activity as a direct regulatory protein that can bind specific DNA or RNA targets under particular conditions or they may affect the activity of transcription factors by covalent modification or direct protein-protein interaction. In this chapter, we provide an overview on these mechanisms and discuss the relevance of trigger enzymes for virulence gene expression in bacterial pathogens.
Anatomy and Physiology of the Urinary Tract: Relation to Host Defense and Microbial Infection
Authors: Hickling Duane R. , Sun Tung-Tien , Wu Xue-Ru 
Published: July 2015

ABSTRACT

The urinary tract exits to a body surface area that is densely populated by a wide range of microbes. Yet, under most normal circumstances, it is typically considered sterile, i.e., devoid of microbes, a stark contrast to the gastrointestinal and upper respiratory tracts where many commensal and pathogenic microbes call home. Not surprisingly, infection of the urinary tract over a healthy person’s lifetime is relatively infrequent, occurring once or twice or not at all for most people. For those who do experience an initial infection, the great majority (70% to 80%) thankfully do not go on to suffer from multiple episodes. This is a far cry from the upper respiratory tract infections, which can afflict an otherwise healthy individual countless times. The fact that urinary tract infections are hard to elicit in experimental animals except with inoculum 3–5 orders of magnitude greater than the colony counts that define an acute urinary infection in humans (10
5
cfu/ml), also speaks to the robustness of the urinary tract defense. How can the urinary tract be so effective in fending off harmful microbes despite its orifice in a close vicinity to that of the microbe-laden gastrointestinal tract? While a complete picture is still evolving, the general consensus is that the anatomical and physiological integrity of the urinary tract is of paramount importance in maintaining a healthy urinary tract. When this integrity is breached, however, the urinary tract can be at a heightened risk or even recurrent episodes of microbial infections. In fact, recurrent urinary tract infections are a significant cause of morbidity and time lost from work and a major challenge to manage clinically. Additionally, infections of the upper urinary tract often require hospitalization and prolonged antibiotic therapy. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the basic anatomy and physiology of the urinary tract with an emphasis on their specific roles in host defense. We also highlight the important structural and functional abnormalities that predispose the urinary tract to microbial infections.
Vacuum structure and gravitational bags produced by metric-independent space–time volume-form dynamics
Authors: Guendelman Eduardo , Nissimov Emil , Pacheva Svetlana 
Published: July 2015

We propose a new class of gravity-matter theories, describing [Formula: see text] gravity interacting with a nonstandard nonlinear gauge field system and a scalar “dilaton,” formulated in terms of two different non-Riemannian volume-forms (generally covariant integration measure densities) on the underlying space–time manifold, which are independent of the Riemannian metric. The nonlinear gauge field system contains a square-root [Formula: see text] of the standard Maxwell Lagrangian which is known to describe charge confinement in flat space–time. The initial new gravity-matter model is invariant under global Weyl-scale symmetry which undergoes a spontaneous breakdown upon integration of the non-Riemannian volume-form degrees of freedom. In the physical Einstein frame we obtain an effective matter-gauge-field Lagrangian of “k-essence” type with quadratic dependence on the scalar “dilaton” field kinetic term [Formula: see text], with a remarkable effective scalar potential possessing two infinitely large flat regions as well as with nontrivial effective gauge coupling constants running with the “dilaton” [Formula: see text]. Corresponding to each of the two flat regions we find “vacuum” configurations of the following types: (i) [Formula: see text] and a nonzero gauge field vacuum [Formula: see text], which corresponds to a charge confining phase; (ii) [Formula: see text] (“kinetic vacuum”) and ordinary gauge field vacuum [Formula: see text] which supports confinement-free charge dynamics. In one of the flat regions of the effective scalar potential we also find: (iii) [Formula: see text] (“kinetic vacuum”) and a nonzero gauge field vacuum [Formula: see text], which again corresponds to a charge confining phase. In all three cases, the space–time metric is de Sitter or Schwarzschild–de Sitter. Both “kinetic vacuums” (ii) and (iii) can exist only within a finite-volume space region below a de Sitter horizon. Extension to the whole space requires matching the latter with the exterior region with a nonstandard Reissner–Nordström–de Sitter geometry carrying an additional constant radial background electric field. As a result, we obtain two classes of gravitational bag-like configurations with properties, which on one hand partially parallel some of the properties of the solitonic “constituent quark” model and, on the other hand, partially mimic some of the properties of MIT bags in QCD phenomenology.
Non-profit geographically constrained locator
Authors: McGuffee James W. 
Published: July 2015

There exist numerous non-profit entities and organizations that provide social services to those in need. These organizations may be governmental, secular, parochial, or religious. The services provided may be long term institutionalized support, seasonal or limited time benefits. Beneficiaries of social services may be restricted by age, sex, family status, citizenship, and/or income level. Given this variability, we envisioned the need to create an interactive geographically constrained web based social services client matching system. In this system, a client would enter basic demographic information and the system would return a set of available social services within a specific geographic area.
As a first step in trying to create this system, undergraduate student Dan Myers investigated the viability of using Scrapy to crawl and scrape data from the web based on geographic location. Scrapy is an open-source web crawling framework written in Python. Scrapy was chosen because it is open source, widely used, and provides tools for both scraping and crawling [2]. The main focus of Dan Myers' project was to write a web crawler that utilizes regular expressions to extract relevant data from geographically targeted websites. Specifically, Dan's project used Scrapy to find all web mentions of physical addresses in the zip codes of the three most northern counties in Kentucky. The two main tasks for this project were (1) to use Scrapy's spider class to extract street addresses from the chosen zip codes and (2) to create a Scrapy item object to manage the data. This project demonstrated that by using the open source tool Scrapy, the problem of extracting geographically relevant information is faster and easier to manage than previously proposed systems such as the gazetteer approach used in the web-a-where project [1].
The next phase of the project will be undertaken by a team of UR-STEM students in the summer of 2015. At NKU, UR-STEM (which stands for undergraduate research in STEM) is a paid summer research opportunity for students early in their college careers. A goal for this summer's research will be the creation of a fully working prototype of a web based non-profit geographically constrained locator. Depending on the quality of the code produced, the project may be released as the first version of an ongoing open source software project which could, potentially, lead to the creation of an HFOSS (Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software) project whose original programmers are all students [3].
Imaging Tumor Acidity: pH-Low Insertion Peptide Probe for Optoacoustic Tomography
Authors: Reshetnyak Yana K. 
Published: July 2015

Abstract
Optoacoustic tomography has been used for the detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma targeted by pH-low insertion peptide (pHLIP) conjugated to near-infrared fluorescent dye. It was proved that tumor targeting is pH dependent. The approach could have major implication for detection and monitoring of pancreatic and other cancers. Clin Cancer Res; 21(20); 4502–4. ©2015 AACR.
See related article by Kimbrough et al., p. 4576
Extrastriate Visual Areas Integrate Form Features over Space and Time to Construct Representations of Stationary and Rigidly Rotating Objects
Authors: McCarthy J. Daniel , Kohler Peter J. , Tse Peter U. , Caplovitz Gideon Paul 
Published: July 2015

AbstractWhen an object moves behind a bush, for example, its visible fragments are revealed at different times and locations across the visual field. Nonetheless, a whole moving object is perceived. Unlike traditional modal and amodal completion mechanisms known to support spatial form integration when all parts of a stimulus are simultaneously visible, relatively little is known about the neural substrates of the spatiotemporal form integration (STFI) processes involved in generating coherent object representations from a succession visible fragments. We used fMRI to identify brain regions involved in two mechanisms supporting the representation of stationary and rigidly rotating objects whose form features are shown in succession: STFI and position updating. STFI allows past and present form cues to be integrated over space and time into a coherent object even when the object is not visible in any given frame. STFI can occur whether or not the object is moving. Position updating allows us to perceive a moving object, whether rigidly rotating or translating, even when its form features are revealed at different times and locations in space. Our results suggest that STFI is mediated by visual regions beyond V1 and V2. Moreover, although widespread cortical activation has been observed for other motion percepts derived solely from form-based analyses [Tse, P. U. Neural correlates of transformational apparent motion. Neuroimage, 31, 766–773, 2006; Krekelberg, B., Vatakis, A., & Kourtzi, Z. Implied motion from form in the human visual cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 94, 4373–4386, 2005], increased responses for the position updating that lead to rigidly rotating object representations were only observed in visual areas KO and possibly hMT+, indicating that this is a distinct and highly specialized type of processing.
A new species of Hechtia (Bromeliaceae: Hechtioideae) from Hidalgo (Mexico)
Authors: Ramírez Ivón M. , Hornung-Leoni Claudia , González Manuel , Treviño-Carreon Jacinto 
Published: July 2015

We propose that two populations previously referred to Hechtia epigyna, from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, represent a new species. Plants from the Hidalgo populations share the inferior ovary with Hechtia epigyna, an unusual trait in the genus, but they differ in their growth pattern (central vs. lateral inflorescence), characters of the adaxial foliar surface, petal color, and fruit position during dehiscence. We also provide a clarification on the typification of Hechtia epigyna. An assessment of the conservation status of the new species, Hechtia deceptrix following IUCN criteria resulted as CR (Critically Endangered).
Representation of African Easterly Waves in CMIP5 Models
Authors: Martin Elinor R. , Thorncroft Chris 
Published: July 2015

Abstract
African easterly waves (AEWs) can act as seed disturbances for tropical cyclones (TCs) in the Atlantic, and changes in future AEW activity may have important consequences for development of TCs. The simulation of AEWs was investigated using output from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) suite of experiments, including coupled historical and future simulations and atmosphere only (AMIP) simulations. Large biases exist in the simulation of low- (850 hPa) and midlevel (700 hPa) eddy kinetic energy (EKE, a proxy for AEW activity) in AMIP and historical simulations. CMIP5 models simulate excessive EKE and deficient rainfall south of 17°N. The same biases exist in historical and AMIP models and are not a consequence of errors in sea surface temperatures. The models also struggle to accurately couple AEWs and rainfall, with little improvement from CMIP3 models. CMIP5 models are unable to propagate AEWs across the coast and into the Atlantic, which is shown to be related to the resolution of the Guinea Highlands. Future projections of the annual cycle of AEW activity show a reduction in late spring and early summer and a large increase between July and October that is consistent with rainfall projections in the Sahel, but large differences exists in future projections between high- and low-resolution models. The simulation of AEWs is challenging for CMIP5 models and must be further diagnosed in order to accurately predict future TC activity and rainfall in the Sahel.
The equivocal concept: The work of Bourahima Ouattara
Authors: Goldsmiths Jean-Paul Martinon 
Published: July 2015

Abstract
The philosopher Bourahima Ouattara claims that Africans have a unique feature that can help them fight against the west’s economic, cultural and intellectual hegemony and therefore against globalization. This feature is that of ‘being’ outside of all conceptuality. Being outside (or being-third), sub-Saharan Africans are therefore able to expose the weakness of the west’s mighty power: the stubborn repetition of its founding principle: the concept. Instead of just emulating concepts from former colonies or avidly promoted by global capitalism, sub-Saharan Africa should, according to him, unhinge itself from the concept in order to undermine the concept-driven modernity that marks our world’s destiny. Can Bourahima Ouattara’s bold claim really work? Should we all – i.e. not just Africans – listen to him? This article tries not only to make sense but also to test this ambitious attempt to undermine the arrogance and imperialism of the concept, this cornerstone of western philosophy since Plato.
Le philosophe Bourahima Ouattara nous dit que les Africains ont une caractéristique unique qui peut les aider à combattre l’hégémonie économique, culturelle et intellectuelle de l’occident et donc à lutter contre la mondialisation dominante. Cette caractéristique est celle ‘d’être’ l’autre de toute conceptualité. Étant l’autre de l’autre (ou ‘être-en-tiers’), les Africains subsahariens peuvent donc exposer la faiblesse de l’occident: la répétition jamais suffisamment achevée de son principe fondateur: le concept. Au lieu de simplement suivre ou imiter les concepts et donc les valeurs des anciennes colonies, toujours avidement promus par le capitalisme mondial, l’Afrique subsaharienne devrait, selon lui, se ‘decrocher’ du concept de façon à saper l’axe modernité / concept, cet axe qui marque le destin du monde. Se peut-il que Bourahima Ouattara ait raison? Devrions-nous tous – et non pas seulement l’Afrique – l’écouter et nous ‘decrocher’ ainsi du concept? Cet essai a deux buts: présenter brièvement l’oeuvre de B. Ouattara et tester cette tentative ambitieuse de ruiner l’arrogance et l’impérialisme du concept, cette pierre angulaire de la philosophie occidentale depuis Platon.
The Musical Expression of Identity in Maale Patrilineal Society (Southern Ethiopia)
Authors: Ferran Hugo 
Published: July 2015

Abstract
Located in Southern Ethiopia, the Maale traditionalists act for the preservation of a particular form of ancestor worship. Their society, highly hierarchized, is based on a complex patrilineal organization. Several researchers have shed light on the numerous markers used by the Maale traditionalists to express their position in the social hierarchy. This article aims at highlighting the various ways in which Maale music participates in this system of differentiation. In a continuation of previous studies, this article argues that gender, kinship, descent, and fertility are key concepts in understanding the Maale conception of hierarchy. Within this framework, Maale music appears as an offering that the musicians address to their ancestors and lineage elders. Culturally, each offering is supposed to convey four types of information, which are the musical context, the circumstance, and the social position of the musicians and of their social elders. The ethnomusicological analysis reveals the ways in which the lyrics, dance, instruments, and musical parameters convey all these pieces of information.