Carbohydrate scaffolds as glycosyltransferase inhibitors with in vivo antibacterial activity

The rapid rise of multi-drug-resistant bacteria is a global healthcare crisis, and new antibiotics are urgently required, especially those with modes of action that have low-resistance potential. One promising lead is the liposaccharide antibiotic moenomycin that inhibits bacterial glycosyltransferases, which are essential for peptidoglycan polymerization, while displaying a low rate of resistance. Unfortunately, the lipophilicity of moenomycin leads to unfavourable pharmacokinetic properties that render it unsuitable for systemic administration. In this study, we show that using moenomycin and other glycosyltransferase inhibitors as templates, we were able to synthesize compound libraries based on novel pyranose scaffold chemistry, with moenomycin-like activity, but with improved drug-like properties. The novel compounds exhibit in vitro inhibition comparable to moenomycin, with low toxicity and good efficacy in several in vivo models of infection. This approach based on non-planar carbohydrate scaffolds provides a new opportunity to develop new antibiotics with low propensity for resistance induction

Application of FPA Test System Technology to Commercial Inspection/Measurement Systems

Research conducted for the Army has recently developed an FPA (focal plane array) integrated test and evaluation system to provide a testbed for evaluating FPA characteristics and resulting object detection effectiveness. The system design offers various combinations of image processing algorithms with real--time display of raw and processed (i.e., resulting from the application of each chosen algorithm) FPA data. Because this design does not restrict itself to one particular processing scheme, it can be used for a variety of non--military applications requiring object detection within image frames. This paper investigates application of the FPA test system to commercial inspection/measurement tasks, presenting experimental results for product classification by size and color and for product grading by size, features, and quality. Introduction Image processing for object recognition can be accomplished through a variety of filtering and signal processing techniques. For a given appli..

Higher Education and Prosperity: From Catholic Missionaries to Luminosity in India

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12551This article estimates the impact of completed higher education on economic prosperity across Indian districts. To address the endogeneity of higher education, we use the location of Catholic missionaries circa 1911 as an instrument. Catholics constitute a very small share of the population in India and their influence beyond higher education has been limited. Our instrumental variable results find a positive effect of higher education on development, as measured by light density. The results are robust to alternative measures of development, and are not driven by lower levels of schooling or other channels by which missionaries could impact current income

Measurement of the Ωc0\Omega_c^0 lifetime at Belle II

We report on a measurement of the $\Omega_c^0$ lifetime using $\Omega_c^0 \to \Omega^-\pi^+$ decays reconstructed in $e^+e^-\to c\bar{c}$ data collected by the Belle II experiment and corresponding to $207~{\rm fb^{-1}}$ of integrated luminosity. The result, $\rm\tau(\Omega_c^0)=243\pm48( stat)\pm11(syst)~fs$, agrees with recent measurements indicating that the $\Omega_c^0$ is not the shortest-lived weakly decaying charmed baryon