Detection of Borrelia-specific 16S rRNA sequence in total RNA extracted from Ixodes ricinus ticks

A reverse transcriptase - polymerase chain reaction based assay for Borrelia species detection in ticks was developed. The method was based on amplification of 552 nucleotide bases long sequence of 16S rRNA, targeted by Borrelia specific primers. In the present study, total RNA extracted from Ixodes ricinus ticks was used as template. The results showed higher sensitivity for Borrelia detection as compared to standard dark-field microscopy. Method specificity was confirmed by cloning and sequencing of obtained 552 base pairs long amplicons. Phylogenetic analysis of obtained sequences showed that they belong to B. lusitaniae and B. afzelii genospecies. RT-PCR based method presented in this paper could be very useful as a screening test for detecting pathogen presence, especially when in investigations is required extraction of total RNA from ticks

Prospective associations of coronary heart disease loci in African Americans using the MetaboChip

Background: Coronary heart disease (CHD) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in African Americans. However, there is a paucity of studies assessing genetic determinants of CHD in African Americans. We examined the association of publishe

Cosmological Constraints from Measurements of Type Ia Supernovae Discovered during the First 1.5 yr of the Pan-STARRS1 Survey

We present griz P1 light curves of 146 spectroscopically confirmed Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia; 0.03 < z < 0.65) discovered during the first 1.5 yr of the Pan-STARRS1 Medium Deep Survey. The Pan-STARRS1 natural photometric system is determined by a combination of on-site measurements of the instrument response function and observations of spectrophotometric standard stars. We find that the systematic uncertainties in the photometric system are currently 1.2% without accounting for the uncertainty in the Hubble Space Telescope Calspec definition of the AB system. A Hubble diagram is constructed with a subset of 113 out of 146 SNe Ia that pass our light curve quality cuts. The cosmological fit to 310 SNe Ia (113 PS1 SNe Ia + 222 light curves from 197 low-z SNe Ia), using only supernovae (SNe) and assuming a constant dark energy equation of state and flatness, yields $w=-1.120^{+0.360}_{-0.206}\hbox{(Stat)} ^{+0.269}_{-0.291}\hbox{(Sys)}$. When combined with BAO+CMB(Planck)+H 0, the analysis yields $\Omega _{\rm M}=0.280^{+0.013}_{-0.012}$ and $w=-1.166^{+0.072}_{-0.069}$ including all identified systematics. The value of w is inconsistent with the cosmological constant value of –1 at the 2.3σ level. Tension endures after removing either the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) or the H 0 constraint, though it is strongest when including the H 0 constraint. If we include WMAP9 cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints instead of those from Planck, we find $w=-1.124^{+0.083}_{-0.065}$, which diminishes the discord to <2σ. We cannot conclude whether the tension with flat ΛCDM is a feature of dark energy, new physics, or a combination of chance and systematic errors. The full Pan-STARRS1 SN sample with ~three times as many SNe should provide more conclusive results

Prediction of run-time resource consumption in multi-task component-based software systems

Embedded systems must be cost-effective. This imposesstrict requirements on the resource consumption of their applications. It is therefore desirable to be able to determine the resource consumption of applications as early as possible in its development. Only then, a designer is able to guarantee that an application will fit on a target device. In this paper we will present a method for predicting run-time resource resource consumption in multi-task component based systems based on a design of an application. In [5] we describe a scenario based resource prediction technique and show that it can be applied to non-pre-emptive non-processing resources, like memory. In this paper we extend this technique, which enables us to handle pre-emptive processing resources and their scheduling policies. Examples of these class of resources are CPU and network. For component based software engineering the challenge is to express resource consumption characteristics per component, and to combine them to do predictions over compositions of components. To this end, we propose a model and tools, for combining individual resource estimations of components. These composed resource estimations are then used in scenarios (which model run-time behavior) to predict resource consumption

C++11 Enhancements for Eclipse CDT

The aim of this project was to develop an Eclipse plug-in to help highlighting and fixing initialization issues in respect to the new C++11 brace-initializer syntax. The C++11 brace-initializer provides a uniform syntax for initialization, and is preferred in C++11 code over pre-C++11 initialization mechanisms such as copy-initialization or direct-initialization. The developed Eclipse plug-in detects initialization issues and provides an automated quickfix, to make it as easy as possible to fix initialization issues. Besides detecting issues, the plug-in also ensures that no semantic changes are introduced by a quickfix, so the resulting code is equivalent. The plug-in is written in Java, using Eclipse CDT’s Codan, which is a static code analysis framework for C++, providing an abstract syntax tree, that we traverse and modify to detect and fix the issues. To realize the Eclipse plug-in the existing quickfix-plug-in framework was used to ensure that the plug-in integrates well into eclipse and behaves as any other quickfix plug-in. To enable efficient fixing of larger code-bases to C++11-initializations, an additional massrefactoring has been implemented. This functionality can be triggered from the usual refactoring menus, to fix either complete source files or even full projects