Whole cells of Bacillus halodurans LBK 261 were used as a source of catalase for degradation of hydrogen peroxide. The organism, B. halodurans grown at 55 degrees C and pH 10, yielded a maximum catalase activity of 275U g(-1) (wet wt.) cells. The catalase in the whole cells was active over a broad range of pH with a maximum at pH8-9. The enzyme was optimally active at 55 degrees C, but had low sta

Antibody microarray based technology is a powerful emerging tool in proteomics, target discovery, and differential analysis. Here, we report the first study where recombinant antibody fragments have been used to construct large scale antibody microarrays, composed of 127 different antibodies against mostly immunoregulatory antigens. The arrays were based on single framework recombinant antibody fr

Insulin receptor substrate-1 (IRS-1) is tyrosine-phosphorylated in response to insulin resulting in association with and activation of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase), thereby initiating some of the effects of insulin. We have recently shown that the insulin-like effects of growth hormone (GH) in adipocytes can be inhibited by the selective PI 3-kinase inhibitor wortmannin (Ridderstral

Nonstoichiometric CuOx/CeO2 nanocomposite particles have been synthesized by inert gas condensation (IGC) over the whole compositional range (2 to 98 at.% Cu). The composition influences greatly the formation of various nanostructures, such as core-shells. A wide range of techniques were used to characterize the catalysts: high-resolution TEM and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, as well as high-e

Proteolytic cleavage of the Na+/Ca2+ exchanger (NCX) by calpains impairs calcium homeostasis, leading to a delayed calcium overload and excitotoxic cell death. However, it is not known whether reversal of the exchanger contributes to activate calpains and trigger neuronal death. We investigated the role of the reversal of the NCX in Ca2+ dynamics, calpain activation and cell viability, in alpha-am

Subaxial (below the C 2) caudal dislocation is in the present study defined as a complete or partial dislocation caudally of a vertebral body (C 3 or below) into the plane of a lower vertebral body. In rheumatoid arthritis this dislocation is combined with erosive lesions of the vertebral bodies. In the present retrospective study seven such cases are presented. All were middle-aged or elderly wom

Human therapeutic cloning is a recently emerged application of somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which is currently being performed to produce patient-specific stem cell lines for future stem cell therapies. The advantages in producing human nuclear transfer (NT) embryos to derive NT stem cell lines are that these can be tailor-made (i.e., are autologous in nature) for the patient and may over

As a group of stars having high luminosity and thus being able to be detected to great distances, massive M supergiants are extremely helpful to the study of the kinematics of the Milky Way. They are also partly responsible for the creation of post iron-group elements through the weak s-process of nucleosynthesis. As there are relatively few classified M supergiants, owing to their rapid pace of e

A united description of the electrostatics of an arbitrary number of electrostatic multipoles, each localized in a spherical dielectric cavity, in a dielectric medium is presented. The permanent charges as well as the polarization surface charges are described by multipole expansions in standard format. Expressions of the polarization surface charge density, the electrostatic potential energy, and

Background: In recent years an increase of the incidence of nosocomial outbreaks caused by noroviruses has been observed throughout Sweden, with high peaks noted in the winter seasons 2002/2003 and 2004/2005, respectively. Objectives: To phylogenetically characterize norovirus strains causing nosocomial outbreaks from 1997 to 2005 and estimate the impact of norovirus-like disease on the Swedish he

The short-term (i.e., days) and long-term (i.e., months) effects of adaptation to posturography examinations were investigated in 12 normal subjects who were repeatedly examined for five consecutive days and again after 90 days. The examinations were conducted both with eyes open and closed, and the perturbations were evoked by a pseudorandomly applied vibration stimulation to the calf muscles. Th

The increased bronchial production of leukotriene C4 (LTC4) in asthma is assumed to derive from infiltrating eosinophils expressing LTC4-synthase (LTC4S). Multicolor immunohistofluorescence examination of bronchial cryosections from 30 treated, untreated, or bronchial antigen-provoked aspirin-tolerant individuals with asthma and nine control subjects revealed that the dominating LTC4S-expressing c

Bone disease is an important feature of multiple myeloma, and hypercalcaemia is a frequent complication of this disease. We examined the association between serum calcium and quality of life (QOL) scores of 686 multiple myeloma patients at the time of diagnosis. Data from two Nordic studies using the EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire were analysed by means of linear regression analysis and a curve fitti

The aim of the present study was to compare in man the innervation pattern and the functional responses to neuronal messengers in medium sized lenticulostriate and branches of the posterior cerebral arteries (PCA). The majority of the nerve fibers found were sympathetic and displayed specific immunoreactivity for tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and neuropeptide Y (NPY). Only few nerve fibers displayed v

Fengycin is a biologically active lipopeptide produced by several Bacillus subtilis strains. The lipopeptide is known to develop antifungal activity against filamentous fungi and to have hemolytic activity 40-fold lower than that of surfactin, another lipopeptide produced by B. subtilis. The aim of this work is to use complementary biophysical techniques to reveal the mechanism of membrane perturb

The problem addressed in nonlinear dimensionality reduction, is to find lower dimensional configurations of high dimensional data, thereby revealing underlying structure. One popular method in this regard is the Isomap algorithm, where local information is used to find approximate geodesic distances. From such distance estimations, lower dimensional representations, accurate on a global scale, are

Alarm analysis is the task of finding the root cause of a failure situation in an industrial process. In this article, a new approach for performing alarm analysis using multilevel flow models (MFM) is introduced. This approach is compared with existing methods for alarm analysis using MFM. The result of the alarm analysis presented in this article is a set of explanations that fits the observed s