surface motility and invasion into competing communities enhance interspecies antagonism.

Unlabelled: Chronic polymicrobial infections involving and are prevalent, difficult to eradicate, and associated with poor health outcomes. Therefore, understanding interactions between these pathogens is important to inform improved treatment development. We previously demonstrated that is attracted to using type IV pili (TFP)-mediated chemotaxis, but the impact of attraction on growth and physiology remained unknown.

surface motility and invasion into competing communities enhances interspecies antagonism.

Chronic polymicrobial infections involving and are prevalent, difficult to eradicate, and associated with poor health outcomes. Therefore, understanding interactions between these pathogens is important to inform improved treatment development. We previously demonstrated that is attracted to using type IV pili-mediated chemotaxis, but the impact of attraction on growth and physiology remained unknown.

Spatial propagation of temperate phages within and among biofilms.

Bacteria form groups comprised of cells and a secreted polymeric matrix that controls their spatial organization. These groups - termed biofilms - can act as refuges from environmental disturbances and from biotic threats, including phages. Despite the ubiquity of temperate phages and bacterial biofilms, live propagation of temperate phages within biofilms has never been characterized on cellular spatial scales.

Breakdown of clonal cooperative architecture in multispecies biofilms and the spatial ecology of predation.

Biofilm formation, including adherence to surfaces and secretion of extracellular matrix, is common in the microbial world, but we often do not know how interaction at the cellular spatial scale translates to higher-order biofilm community ecology. Here we explore an especially understudied element of biofilm ecology, namely predation by the bacterium . This predator can kill and consume many different Gram-negative bacteria, including and .

Multispecies biofilm architecture determines bacterial exposure to phages.

Numerous ecological interactions among microbes-for example, competition for space and resources, or interaction among phages and their bacterial hosts-are likely to occur simultaneously in multispecies biofilm communities. While biofilms formed by just a single species occur, multispecies biofilms are thought to be more typical of microbial communities in the natural environment. Previous work has shown that multispecies biofilms can increase, decrease, or have no measurable impact on phage exposure of a host bacterium living alongside another species that the phages cannot target.

A comparison of proton stopping power measured with proton CT and x-ray CT in fresh postmortem porcine structures.

Purpose: Currently, calculations of proton range in proton therapy patients are based on a conversion of CT Hounsfield units of patient tissues into proton relative stopping power. Uncertainties in this conversion necessitate larger proximal and distal planned target volume margins. Proton CT can potentially reduce these uncertainties by directly measuring proton stopping power.

Analysis of characteristics of images acquired with a prototype clinical proton radiography system.

Purpose: Verification of patient-specific proton stopping powers obtained in the patient's treatment position can be used to reduce the distal and proximal margins needed in particle beam planning. Proton radiography can be used as a pretreatment instrument to verify integrated stopping power consistency with the treatment planning CT. Although a proton radiograph is a pixel by pixel representation of integrated stopping powers, the image may also be of high enough quality and contrast to be used for patient alignment.

Technical Note: A fast and monolithic prototype clinical proton radiography system optimized for pencil beam scanning.

Purpose: To demonstrate a proton-imaging system based on well-established fast scintillator technology to achieve high performance with low cost and complexity, with the potential of a straightforward translation into clinical use.

Methods: The system tracks individual protons through one (X, Y) scintillating fiber tracker plane upstream and downstream of the object and into a 13-cm -thick scintillating block residual energy detector. The fibers in the tracker planes are multiplexed into silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) to reduce the number of electronics channels.

The Incidence of in Wild Grasses is Associated With Rainfall and Cumulative Host Density in New York.

The movement of plant pathogens between cultivated and natural host communities can result in lost agricultural production and altered microbial or plant biodiversity. incidence was studied in wild grass hosts for 3 years to better understand the ecology of this plant pathogen at the interface of crop fields and nonagricultural environments. Research sites ( = 23) were spread between regions of high and low agricultural production and included both agricultural and nonagricultural fields.

Population Genetics of at the Interface of Wheat and Wild Grass Communities in New York.

is primarily understood as an agricultural pathogen affecting cereal crops, but its host range also includes diverse, noncultivated grasses ubiquitous across agricultural and natural environments. Wild grasses may select for the production of diverse toxin variants (chemotypes) and serve as reservoirs of genetic diversity or sources of disease-inciting inoculum. Populations at the intersection of wheat and wild grass communities were described using 909 isolates collected from wheat spikes, wild grass spikes, and overwintered wild grass stems found at natural and agricultural sites in regions of high and low crop production.

Fast In Situ Image Reconstruction for Proton Radiography.

Objective: Proton beam therapy is an emerging modality for cancer treatment that, compared to X-ray radiation therapy, promises to provide better dose delivery to clinical targets with lower doses to normal tissues. Crucial to accurate treatment planning and dose delivery is knowledge of the water equivalent path length (WEPL) of each ray, or pencil beam, from the skin to every point in the target. For protons, this length is estimated from relative stopping power based on X-ray Hounsfield units.

Reconstructed and Real Proton Radiographs for Image-Guidance in Proton Beam Therapy.

One of the major challenges to proton beam therapy at this time is the uncertainty of the true range of a clinical treatment proton beam as it traverses the various tissues and organs in a human body. This uncertainty necessitates the addition of greater "margins" to the planning target volume along the direction of the beam to ensure safety and tumor target coverage. Proton radiography holds promise as both an image-guidance method for proton beam therapy and as a means of estimating particle beam range in the clinic.

Crystal structure of the ligand-binding domain of a LysR-type transcriptional regulator: transcriptional activation via a rotary switch.

LysR-type transcriptional regulators (LTTRs) generally bind to target promoters in two conformations, depending on the availability of inducing ligands. OccR is an LTTR that regulates the octopine catabolism operon of Agrobacterium tumefaciens. OccR binds to a site located between the divergent occQ and occR promoters.

Plasmonic effects in ultrathin amorphous silicon solar cells: performance improvements with Ag nanoparticles on the front, the back, and both.

Thin-film hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) solar cells that are free-standing over a 2x2 mm area have been fabricated with thicknesses of 150 nm, 100 nm, and 60 nm. Silver nanoparticles (NPs) created on the front and/or back surfaces of the solar cells led to improvement in performance measures such as current density, overall efficiency, and external quantum efficiency. The effect of changing silver nanoparticle size and incident light angle was tested.

Nanoporous silicon nitride membranes fabricated from porous nanocrystalline silicon templates.

The extraordinary permeability and manufacturability of ultrathin silicon-based membranes are enabling devices with improved performance and smaller sizes in such important areas as molecular filtration and sensing, cell culture, electroosmotic pumping, and hemodialysis. Because of the robust chemical and mechanical properties of silicon nitride (SiN), several laboratories have developed techniques for patterning nanopores in SiN using reactive ion etching (RIE) through a template structure. These methods however, have failed to produce pores small enough for ultrafiltration (<100 nm) in SiN and involve templates that are prone to microporous defects.

Expanding the primate body schema in sensorimotor cortex by virtual touches of an avatar.

The brain representation of the body, called the body schema, is susceptible to plasticity. For instance, subjects experiencing a rubber hand illusion develop a sense of ownership of a mannequin hand when they view it being touched while tactile stimuli are simultaneously applied to their own hand. Here, the cortical basis of such an embodiment was investigated through concurrent recordings from primary somatosensory (i.

X-ray speckle visibility spectroscopy in the single-photon limit.

The technique of speckle visibility spectroscopy has been employed for the measurement of dynamics using coherent X-ray scattering. It is shown that the X-ray contrast within a single exposure can be related to the relaxation time of the intermediate scattering function, and this methodology is applied to the diffusion of 72 nm-radius latex spheres in glycerol. Data were collected with exposure times as short as 2 ms by employing a resonant shutter.

Future developments in brain-machine interface research.

Neuroprosthetic devices based on brain-machine interface technology hold promise for the restoration of body mobility in patients suffering from devastating motor deficits caused by brain injury, neurologic diseases and limb loss. During the last decade, considerable progress has been achieved in this multidisciplinary research, mainly in the brain-machine interface that enacts upper-limb functionality. However, a considerable number of problems need to be resolved before fully functional limb neuroprostheses can be built.

Pleiotropic impact of a single lysine mutation on biosynthesis of and catalysis by N-methyltryptophan oxidase.

N-Methyltryptophan oxidase (MTOX) contains covalently bound FAD. N-Methyltryptophan binds in a cavity above the re face of the flavin ring. Lys259 is located above the opposite, si face.

Piano hammers and their force compression characteristics: does a power law make sense?

We have studied the force characteristics of a collection of piano hammers, through studies of the acceleration of the hammer head, the force due to the compression of the hammer felt, Fh, and the associated bending of the hammer shank which occurs when a hammer strikes a rigid object. By integration of the acceleration one can estimate the compression of the felt, and thus obtain a force-compression Fh(z) relationship; our results for this function are compared with previous experiments and theoretical models. Close examination of our findings suggests that bending of the hammer shank, and also the time required for the force to be transmitted from the outer edge of the hammer to its core, play significant roles in the hammer dynamics.

Self-induced orbital emphysema as a presenting sign of Munchausen's syndrome.

A bizarre case of severe, debilitating pneumo-orbit resulting in proptosis, blindness, and eventual exenteration of the right eye and threatening the same fate for the left eye was worked up painstakingly for over 10 years before a final diagnosis of Munchausen's syndrome was uncovered. Five days after the diagnosis was made and appropriate management was instituted the severely proptotic left eye had returned to normal and the patient was discharged for out-patient psychiatric follow-up. A discussion of the differential diagnosis of pneumo-orbit is presented and Munchausen's syndrome, the final diagnosis in this case, is discussed from both an historical and psychiatric perspective.