Hände bei rheumatoider Arthritis: Use them or lose them?

Wear them, forget them.

Slowing them down will make them lose: a role for attine ant crop fungus in defending pupae against infections?

Fungus-growing ants (Attini) have evolved an obligate dependency upon a basidiomycete fungus that they cultivate as their food. Less well known is that the crop fungus is also used by many attine species to cover their eggs, larvae and pupae. The adaptive functional significance of this brood covering is poorly understood. One hypothesis to account for this behaviour is that it is part of the p...

Off-label prescriptions: how to identify them, frame them, announce them and monitor them in practice?

Following the Mediator crisis and the passage of the Health and Safety Law of December 2011, off-label prescriptions are a real concern shared by all those involved in healthcare system. Off-label, in the strictest sense of the term, is defined as all prescriptions that do not correspond to the summary of product characteristics (SPC), particularly those that fail to comply with the indications...

Build them up and break them down

Tight junctions (TJs) of cells expressing simple epithelial polarity have been extensively studied, but less is known about TJs of cells expressing complex polarity. In this paper we analyzed, TJs of four different lines, that form bile canaliculi (BC) and express typical hepatocyte polarity; WIF-B9, 11-3, Can 3-1, Can 10. Striking differences were observed in claudin expression. None of the ce...

Likert scales: how to (ab)use them.

Dipping my toe into the water of educational research, I have recently used Likert-type rating scales to measure student views on various educational interventions. Likert scales are commonly used to measure attitude, providing a range of responses to a given question or statement . Typically, there are 5 categories of response, from (for example) 1 1⁄4 strongly disagree to 5 1⁄4 strongly agree...