Eight strains of Cryptococcus neoformans var. neoformans isolated from AIDS patients in the Infectious Disease Institute, University of Turin, Italy, were examined for growth and extracellular proteolytic activity in culture with solid and liquid media. All of the strains grew well on Yeast Carbon Base (YCB) agar medium supplemented with both 0.1% (w/v) bovine serum albumin (BSA) and 0.01% (w/v) polypeptone (Pp), and produced a clear proteolytic zone around their colonies, whereas they exhibited less growth and proteolytic activity on YCB medium supplemented with BSA alone. Strain #8 with a strong proteolytic activity was cultured in three different liquid media. Its growth was limited in YCB medium supplemented with 0.1% BSA, but was moderate in that with 0.01% Pp. Enhanced growth was supported by the addition of both BSA and Pp to the YCB medium. The relative value of the final cellular yields obtained with the above YCB-0.1% BSA, YCB-0.01% Pp and YCB-0.1% BSA-0.01% Pp media was approximately 1:10:20. In the culture with YCB medium containing both BSA and Pp, a rapid decrease in the amount of BSA was demonstrated by a spectrophotometric assay and gel electrophoresis of the culture supernatant after the log-to-stationary phase. The proteolytic activity in the culture supernatant became detectable after the log phase when tested with skim milk agarose plates. These results allowed us to conclude that Cr. neoformans var. neoformans is able to secrete protease and to utilize protein as a source of nitrogen.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and undergraduate dental students' ability to deal with different situations of communication in a clinical dentistry practical training course of communication skills. Fourth-year students in 2012 and in 2013 at the Nippon Dental University School of Life Dentistry at Niigata participated in the survey. The total number of participating students was 129 (88 males and 41 females). The students were asked to complete the Japanese version of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test in communication skills. Female students tended to have significantly higher EI score than males. The EI score in the group with high-grade academic performers was higher than in the low-grade group. The influence of EI on academic performance appeared to be mainly due to the students' ability to accurately perceiving emotions and to their ability to understand emotional issues. The importance of EI may also lie in its ability to parse out personality factors from more changeable aspects of a person's behavior. Although further studies are required, we believe that dental educators need to assume the responsibility to help students develop their emotional competencies that they will need to prosper in their chosen careers. In our conclusion, dental educators should support low achievers to increase their levels of self-confidence instead of concentrating mainly on improving their technical skill and academic performance. This may lead to upgrading their skills for managing emotions and to changing their learning approach.

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There are many types of citrus fruit grading machine with machine vision capability. While most of them sort fruit by size, shape and color, detection of fruit rot remains challenging because their colors are similar with normal parts. Objectives of this research were to investigate if fluorescence would be a good indicator of the fruit rot, and to develop an economical solution to add the rot inspection capability to an existing machine vision fruit inspection station. A machine vision system consisting of a pair of white and UV LED lighting devices and a color CCD camera was proposed for the orange fruit grading task. Since the time lag between the color and fluorescence image captures was short (14 ms), it was possible to inspect color, shape, size, and rot of a fruit on the move before it leaves an existing industrial inspection chamber.