Acinetobacter baumannii invades epithelial cells and outer membrane protein A mediates interactions with epithelial cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Acinetobacter baumannii </it>is a nosocomial pathogen of increasing importance, but the pathogenic mechanism of this microorganism has not been fully explored. This study investigated the potential of <it>A. baumannii </it>to invade epithelial cells and determined the role of <it>A. baumannii </it>outer membrane protein A (AbOmpA) in interactions with epithelial cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p><it>A. baumannii </it>invaded epithelial cells by a zipper-like mechanism, which is associated with microfilament- and microtubule-dependent uptake mechanisms. Internalized bacteria were located in the membrane-bound vacuoles. Pretreatment of recombinant AbOmpA significantly inhibited the adherence to and invasion of <it>A. baumannii </it>in epithelial cells. Cell invasion of isogenic AbOmpA^-mutant significantly decreased as compared with wild-type bacteria. In a murine pneumonia model, wild-type bacteria exhibited a severe lung pathology and induced a high bacterial burden in blood, whereas AbOmpA^-mutant was rarely detected in blood.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p><it>A. baumannii </it>adheres to and invades epithelial cells. AbOmpA plays a major role in the interactions with epithelial cells. These findings contribute to the understanding of <it>A. baumannii </it>pathogenesis in the early stage of bacterial infection.</p

Emergent localized states at the interface of a twofold PT\mathcal{PT}-symmetric lattice

We consider the role of non-triviality resulting from a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian that conserves twofold PT-symmetry assembled by interconnections between a PT-symmetric lattice and its time reversal partner. Twofold PT-symmetry in the lattice produces additional surface exceptional points that play the role of new critical points, along with the bulk exceptional point. We show that there are two distinct regimes possessing symmetry-protected localized states, of which localization lengths are robust against external gain and loss. The states are demonstrated by numerical calculation of a quasi-1D ladder lattice and a 2D bilayered square lattice.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Hypervector Spaces Based on Intersectional Soft Sets

The notion of int-soft subfields, int-soft algebras over int-soft subfields, and int-soft hypervector spaces are introduced, and their properties and characterizations are considered. In connection with linear transformations, int-soft hypervector spaces are discussed

Coderivations of Ranked Bigroupoids

The notion of (co)derivations of ranked bigroupoids is discussed by Alshehri et al. (in press), and their generalized version is studied by Jun et al. (under review press). In particular, Jun et al. (under review press) studied coderivations of ranked bigroupoids. In this paper, the generalization of coderivations of ranked bigroupoids is discussed. The notion of generalized coderivations in ranked bigroupoids is introduced, and new generalized coderivations of ranked bigroupoids are obtained by combining a generalized self-coderivation with a rankomorphism. From the notion of (X,∗,&)-derivation, the existence of a rankomorphism of ranked bigroupoids is established