Patients with erythrokeratodermia cardiomyopathy syndrome exhibit congenital, generalised erythrokeratoderma and dilated cardiomyopathy during early childhood. We report a case of erythrokeratodermia cardiomyopathy syndrome in a 15-year-old male patient and focus this report on cardiac features that were present.

Setaria cervi, a bovine filarial parasite contains significant acid phosphatase (AcP) activity in its various life stages. Two forms of AcP were separated from somatic extract of adult female parasite using cation exchange, gel filtration and concavalin affinity chromatography. One form having a molecular mass of 79 kDa was characterized as dual specific protein tyrosine phosphatase (ScDSP) based on substrate specificity and inhibition studies. With various substrates tested, it showed significant activity in the order of phospho-L-tyrosine>pNPP>ADP>phospho-L-serine. Inhibition by orthovanadate, fluoride, molybdate, and zinc ions further confirms protein tyrosine phosphatase nature of the enzyme. Km and Vmax determined with various substrates were found to be 16·66 mM, 25·0 μM/ml/min with pNPP; 20·0 mM, 40·0 μM/ml/min with phospho-L-tyrosine and 27·0 mM, 25·0 μM/ml/min with phospho-L-serine. KI with pNPP and sodium orthovanadate (IC50 33·0 μM) was calculated to be 50·0 mM. Inhibition with pHMB, silver nitrate, DEPC and EDAC suggested the presence of cysteine, histidine and carboxylate residues at its active site. Cross-reactivity with W. bancrofti-infected sera was demonstrated by Western blotting. ScDSP showed elevated levels of IgE in chronic filarial sera using ELISA. Under in vitro conditions, ScDSP resulted in increased effector function of human eosinophils when stimulated by IgG, which showed a further decrease with increasing enzyme concentration. Results presented here suggest that S. cervi DSP should be further studied to determine its role in pathogenesis and the persistence of filarial parasite.

Due to the increasing popularity of surveillance and security systems, the problem of automatically tracking a moving target by visual servoing has become a research topic deserving more investigation. Nonetheless, the success of tracking a moving target in real-time primarily depends on the performance of the motion detection techniques employed. This paper addresses visual tracking control of an unknown target that could be motional arbitrarily in the scene. A pan-tilt mechanism is used to gain the flexibility of tracking, and the so-called region-based matching method and motion energy method are modified and proposed in this study to detect a moving target based on the consecutive images acquired. A visual servo control scheme that adopts proportional control in the visual loop for reducing the servo lagging is proposed using output disturbance feedforward compensation. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method in achieving high system bandwidth and tracking accuracy.

The identity of Dinophysis sacculus Stein has proved to be problematic in recent years, during which this species has been associated with diarrhoetic shellfish poisoning (DSP) events along European coasts. To complement the scarce and at times contradictory existing information, we provide details of morphological variation in D. sacculus throughout its geographical range, which includes the Mediterranean Sea and European Atlantic coasts. Our data clarify its relationship with D. pavillardii Schröder. This species differs from D. sacculus only by the presence of a concavity along the dorsal margin, but transitional morphotypes are frequent in almost all the samples examined. We therefore propose merging the two species and classifying morphotypes with a dorsal concavity as D. sacculus f. reniformis (Pavillard) comb. nov. Despite the high variability of Dinophysis sacculus, it was generally possible to separate it from D. acuminata Claparède & Lachmann. The only character distinguishing the two species is the shape of the large hypothecal plates, which in D. sacculus are elongate, almost rectangular or sac-like, whereas in D. acuminata they are shorter, more convex dorsally and often more slender towards the antapex. Thecal areolation and sulcal list ornamentation are more pronounced in D. acuminata, although these characters are somewhat variable. Other thecal details, such as the shape of sulcal platelets and the structure of the apical pore area, were not useful for circumscription of the two taxa. In a few samples from the Galician Rias and from the Spanish Mediterranean coast, we observed morphotypes intermediate between D. sacculus and D. acuminata, which indicates that the two species can have slightly overlapping ranges of variability.