Use of MALDI-TOF MS for Rapid Identification of Clinical Bacterial Strains that Are Uncommon or Difficult to Identify.

The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the analytical and practical performance of MALDI-TOF MS for the identification of clinical uncommon or difficult-to-identify bacteria. A total of 180 clinical isolates collected from January 2014 to December 2016, were identified by MALDI-TOF MS and Vitek2 Compact using 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis as the gold method. For MALDI-TOF MS, 152(84.

Prognostic Significance of Periostin and Mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) in Locally Advanced Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

BACKGROUND Periostin and the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) are involved in several cancers. This study aimed to evaluate the expression level of periostin and mTOR in locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and to analyze their correlations with prognostic value. MATERIAL AND METHODS Expression levels of periostin and mTOR were examined by immunohistochemistry in locally advanced ESCC and corresponding adjacent normal tissue of 71 patients.

[Defect modes in one-dimensional comblike photonic crystals].

The photonic band structures and the effect of defect states on photonic band gap in a comblike waveguide geometry which were made of dangling side branches grafted periodically along an infinite monomode waveguide were investigated in this paper. It was discovered that the photonic forbidden bands originates from both the periodicity of the system and the resonance states of the grafted branches. By removing or inserting some defect branches in the star waveguide of finite number of grafted branches, the localized states appear in the transmission spectrum as very narrow peaks.