Different siderophores contribute to the high-pathogenicity phenotype in Yersinia

capture and transport in bacteria. At least one endogenous siderophore system, yersiniabactin, is known to be involved in iron acquisition in highly virulent Yersiniae . Its inactivation in Y. pestis and Y. enterocolitica subsp. enterocolitica results in significant attenuation of virulence. However, the yersiniabactin is not present in all highly virulent Yersiniae. Indeed, the large group of Y. pseudotuberculosis serotypes O2, O3, O4, O5 as well as serotype O1 Far East Scarlet like fever (FESLF) strains carry an alternative, iron acquisition system, pseudochelin, encoded by the Yersinia non-ribosomal peptide ynp locus. Thus, the yersiniabactin activity is not the only one associated with the high-pathogenicity phenotype of the human pathogenic Yersiniae

Influence of angiogenetic factors and matrix metalloproteinases upon tumour progression in non-small-cell lung cancer

We attempted to investigate immunohistochemical expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF), platelet-derived growth factor (PD-ECGF), c-erbB-2, matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2), and MMP-9 using surgical specimens of 119 non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) cases and to evaluate the relationship between the expression levels of each molecule and clinicopathological factors or prognosis. VEGF expression levels were significantly associated with the local invasion (P = 0.0001), lymph node involvement (pN-factor) (P = 0.0019), pathological stage (p-stage) (P = 0.0027) and lymphatic permeation (P = 0.0389). PD-ECGF expression levels were associated with pN-factor (P = 0.0347). MMP-2 expression levels were associated with pN-factor (P = 0.004) and lymphatic permeation (P = 0.0056). Also, MMP-9 expression levels showed a significant correlation to local invasion (P = 0.0012), pN-factor (P = 0.0093) and p-stage (P = 0.0142). Multivariate analysis showed VEGF to be the most related to local invasion (P = 0.0084), and MMP-2 was the only factor with significant independent impact on lymphatic permeation (P = 0.0228). Furthermore, log-rank analysis showed significant association with poor survival by VEGF, bFGF, MMP-2 and MMP-9. Especially, combined overexpression of VEGF and MMP-2 revealed poor prognosis, our study might provide a basis for the better evaluation of biological characteristics and a new therapeutic strategy based on chemotherapy. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer.co

Comparative Genomic Characterization of Three Streptococcus parauberis Strains in Fish Pathogen, as Assessed by Wide-Genome Analyses

Streptococcus parauberis, which is the main causative agent of streptococcosis among olive flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus) in northeast Asia, can be distinctly divided into two groups (type I and type II) by an agglutination test. Here, the whole genome sequences of two Japanese strains (KRS-02083 and KRS-02109) were determined and compared with the previously determined genome of a Korean strain (KCTC 11537). The genomes of S. parauberis are intermediate in size and have lower GC contents than those of other streptococci. We annotated 2,236 and 2,048 genes in KRS-02083 and KRS-02109, respectively. Our results revealed that the three S. parauberis strains contain different genomic insertions and deletions. In particular, the genomes of Korean and Japanese strains encode different factors for sugar utilization; the former encodes the phosphotransferase system (PTS) for sorbose, whereas the latter encodes proteins for lactose hydrolysis, respectively. And the KRS-02109 strain, specifically, was the type II strain found to be able to resist phage infection through the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/Cas system and which might contribute valuably to serologically distribution. Thus, our genome-wide association study shows that polymorphisms can affect pathogen responses, providing insight into biological/biochemical pathways and phylogenetic diversity

Very High-Performance 24-Channels Time-to-Digital Converter in Xilinx 20-nm Kintex UltraScale FPGA

In this contribution, we present the implementation of a resource-saving, 24-channels, high-performance, Tapped Delay-Line (TDL) based, Time-to-Digital Converter (TDC) implemented in a Xilinx 20-nm Kintex UltraScale (XCKU040-2FFVA1156E) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device hosted in a general purpose evaluation board (EVB) KCU105.The term high-performance is not only referred to high-resolution, which is equal to 305 fs over full-scale range of 10.24 μs and single-shot precision below 8.5 ps r.m.s. with maximum operative rate up to 50 MHz per channel, but high-performance also means design flexibility, modularity and, last but not least, low time-to-market and implementation costs.High-resolution over a so wide dynamic-range is provided by Nutt-interpolation. In this way, each one of the 24-channels produces a 25-bit wide timestamp, with LSB of 305 fs, obtained merging a coarse and a fine measure. The coarse contribution is obtained by sampling a 12-bit counter clocked at 400 MHz, whereas the fine part of the measure is returned by the sub-interpolation of eight 512 taps long TDLs by means of a Super Wave Union (SuperWU) algorithm. This choice allows to achieve resolution, in average, sixteen times better than the propagation delay characteristic of the technology in use.The TDLs are implemented with the carry-chains, i.e. the CARRY8 primitive, available into the fabric of the XCKU040 device. Moreover, each channel is equipped with a decoder and a "bin-by-bin" dynamic calibrator able to compensate at best the non-linearity due to the difference among propagation delays of the CARRY8 blocks and the relative temperature drifts.Thanks to the configurability and the modularity provided by the FPGA structure, the presented architecture can be easily migrated on different families of Xilinx UltraScale and UltraScale+ FPGAs and System-on-Chips (SoCs).The read-out is performed via USB 3.0