244 research outputs found
Selling with technology: understanding the resistance to mobile sales assistant use in retailing
No full textA probable cause of paradoxical thrombosis in zygomycosis
No full textInvasive zygomycoses (syn. mucormycoses) are rather rare but life-threatening diseases which often take a peracute course. Particularly endangered are diabetics and patients suffering from siderophilia. Zygomycosis is regularly complicated by thrombosis and subsequent necrosis. Usually it evolves from sinusitis in a rhinocerebral form. With the use of a clinical isolate (Rhizopus microsporus) and sera of the same female survivor, we investigated possible sources of the typical blood clotting. The results suggest that coagulation is probably initiated in a bimodal manner by an extracellular serine proteinase of the fungus and by elastase from the patients' leukocytes. The former causes a partial hydrolysis of fibrinogen, while the latter activates coagulation factor XIII (fibrin stabilizing factor). Both proteinases were present in the patient at the site of infection, and in vitro they jointly bring about regular clotting of fibrinogen
Cerebrospinal Fluid Diagnostics for Neuroinfectious Diseases
No full textCerebrospinal fluid analysis is of prime importance to establish an early diagnosis of central nervous system infections. Beside the basic diagnostics containing CSF white cell count, lactate concentration and protein analysis, the targeted search for agents of bacterial, viral or fungal CNS infectious diseases is essential. Decisive methods are bacterial and fungal staining techniques, microbiological culture methods, nucleic acid amplification and antigen detection methods or indirect identification of pathogens by serologic testings including the determination of pathogen-specific intrathecal immunoglobulin synthesis. Besides imparting basic principles of cerebrospinal fluid analysis, this article focuses on special aspects of detection of infectious agents. Well-directed questions and a close communication between clinician and laboratory allow optimal diagnostic analysis for successful confirmation of the diagnosis and for optimal treatment of the patient
The Trisection Genus of Standard Simply Connected PL 4-Manifolds
No full textGay and Kirby recently introduced the concept of a trisection for arbitrary smooth, oriented closed 4-manifolds, and with it a new topological invariant, called the trisection genus. In this note we show that the K3 surface has trisection genus 22. This implies that the trisection genus of all standard simply connected PL 4-manifolds is known. We show that the trisection genus of each of these manifolds is realised by a trisection that is supported by a singular triangulation. Moreover, we explicitly give the building blocks to construct these triangulations
Admissible Colourings of 3-Manifold Triangulations for Turaev-Viro Type Invariants
No full textTuraev-Viro invariants are amongst the most powerful tools to distinguish 3-manifolds. They are invaluable for mathematical software, but current algorithms to compute them rely on the enumeration of an extremely large set of combinatorial data defined on the triangulation, regardless of the underlying topology of the manifold.
In the article, we propose a finer study of these combinatorial data, called admissible colourings, in relation with the cohomology of the manifold. We prove that the set of admissible colourings to be considered is substantially smaller than previously known, by furnishing new upper bounds on its size that are aware of the topology of the manifold. Moreover, we deduce new topology-sensitive enumeration algorithms based on these bounds.
The paper provides a theoretical analysis, as well as a detailed experimental study of the approach. We give strong experimental evidence on large manifold censuses that our upper bounds are tighter than the previously known ones, and that our algorithms outperform significantly state of the art implementations to compute Turaev-Viro invariants
Small Triangulations of 4-Manifolds and the 4-Manifold Census
No full textWe present a framework to classify PL-types of large censuses of triangulated 4-manifolds, which we use to classify the PL-types of all triangulated 4-manifolds with up to 6 pentachora. This is successful except for triangulations homeomorphic to the 4-sphere, CP², and the rational homology sphere QS⁴(2), where we find at most four, three, and two PL-types respectively. We conjecture that they are all standard. In addition, we look at the cases resisting classification and discuss the combinatorial structure of these triangulations - which we deem interesting in their own rights
A Practical Algorithm for Knot Factorisation
No full textWe present an algorithm for computing the prime factorisation of a knot, which is practical in the following sense: using Regina, we give an implementation that works well for inputs of reasonable size, including prime knots from the 19-crossing census. The main new ingredient in this work is an object that we call an "edge-ideal triangulation", which is what our algorithm uses to represent knots. As other applications, we give an alternative proof that prime knot recognition is in coNP, and present some new complexity results for triangulations. Beyond knots, our work showcases edge-ideal triangulations as a tool for potential applications in 3-manifold topology
Characterization of an extracellular subtilisin protease ofRhizopus microsporusand evidence for its expression during invasive rhinoorbital mycosis
No full textAn endoprotease Arp (alkaline Rhizopus protease) was identified and purified to virtual homogeneity from the culture supernatant of an isolate of Rhizopus microsporus var. rhizopodiformis recovered from a non-fatal case of rhinoorbital mucormycosis. N-terminal sequencing of the mature native enzyme was obtained for the first 20 amino acids and revealed high homology to serine proteases of the subtilisin subfamily. Arp migrated in SDS-PAGE with an estimated molecular mass of 33 kDa and had a pI determined to be at pH 8.8. Arp is proteolytically active against various substrates, including elastin, over a broad pH range between 6 and 12 with an optimum at pH 10.5. After invasive mucormycosis, specific antibodies against Arp were detected in stored serum samples taken from the patient from whom the R. microsporus strain of this study had been isolated. Furthermore, in search of factors involved in thrombosis as a typical complication of mucormycosis, a procoagulatory effect of the enzyme has recently been shown. Altogether, these data substantiate the expression of Arp during human rhinoorbital mucormycosis and suggest a role of the enzyme in pathogenesis
3-Manifold Triangulations with Small Treewidth
No full textMotivated by fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) problems in computational topology, we consider the treewidth tw(M) of a compact, connected 3-manifold M, defined to be the minimum treewidth of the face pairing graph of any triangulation T of M. In this setting the relationship between the topology of a 3-manifold and its treewidth is of particular interest.
First, as a corollary of work of Jaco and Rubinstein, we prove that for any closed, orientable 3-manifold M the treewidth tw(M) is at most 4g(M)-2, where g(M) denotes Heegaard genus of M. In combination with our earlier work with Wagner, this yields that for non-Haken manifolds the Heegaard genus and the treewidth are within a constant factor.
Second, we characterize all 3-manifolds of treewidth one: These are precisely the lens spaces and a single other Seifert fibered space. Furthermore, we show that all remaining orientable Seifert fibered spaces over the 2-sphere or a non-orientable surface have treewidth two. In particular, for every spherical 3-manifold we exhibit a triangulation of treewidth at most two.
Our results further validate the parameter of treewidth (and other related parameters such as cutwidth or congestion) to be useful for topological computing, and also shed more light on the scope of existing FPT-algorithms in the field
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