BACKGROUND Previous studies suggest that adenylate kinase locus 1 (Ak 1 ) has an important role in the control of blood glucose level and in the glycation of structural and functional proteins in type 2 diabetes and in the balanced development of feto-placental unit in healthy puerperae (HP). In this study, an attempt was made to investigate the relationship of Ak 1 with maternal and neonatal p...

INTRODUCTION The angiotensin (Ang) and bradykinin (BK) tissue-system plays a pivotal role in post-conditioning, but the efficacy of angiotensin type 1 receptor (AT1R) blockers (ARBs) in post-ischemic strategies is still under investigation. We evaluated functional and morphological outcomes, together with activation of cytosolic RISK pathway kinases, in rat hearts subjected to losartan (LOS) or...

Recent application of mutation accumulation techniques combined with whole-genome sequencing (MA/WGS) has greatly promoted studies of spontaneous mutation. However, such explorations have rarely been conducted on marine organisms, and it is unclear how marine habitats have influenced genome stability. This report resolves the mutation rate and spectrum of the coral reef pathogen Vibrio shilonii...

Hummingbirds are an important model system in avian biology, but to date the group has been the subject of remarkably few phylogenetic investigations. Here we present partitioned Bayesian and maximum likelihood phylogenetic analyses for 151 of approximately 330 species of hummingbirds and 12 outgroup taxa based on two protein-coding mitochondrial genes (ND2 and ND4), flanking tRNAs, and two nuc...

For linear least squares problems minx kAx ? bk2, where A is sparse except for a few dense rows, a straightforward application of Cholesky or QR factorization will lead to a catastrophic ll in the factor R. We consider handling such problems by a matrix stretching technique, where the dense rows are split into several more sparse rows. We develop both a recursive binary splitting algorithm and ...

In the current study, interstitial fluid (ISF), bradykinin (BK), and angiotensin II (ANG II) levels were measured using cardiac microdialysis in conscious, nonsedated rats at baseline and at 48 h and 5 days after each of the following: sham surgery (sham, n = 6), sham + administration of ANG-converting enzyme inhibitor ramipril (R, n = 6), creation of aortocaval fistula (ACF, n = 6), ACF + R (n...

The DAG Edge Deletion problem of k, or DED(k), is to delete the minimum weight set of edges from a directed acyclic graph such that the remaining graph has no path of length k. In 2012, Svensson showed it was hard to approximate the vertex deletion version with a ratio better than k assuming the Unique Games Conjecture is true [14], and in 2015 Kenkre et al. introduced the DED(k) problem and us...

Brucellosis is one of the major bacterial zoonoses worldwide. In the past decade, an increasing number of atypical Brucella strains and species have been described. Brucella microti in particular has attracted attention, because this species not only infects mammalian hosts but also persists in soil. An environmental reservoir may pose a new public health risk, leading to the reemergence of bru...