The first mouse kidney transplant technique was published in 1973(1) by the Russell laboratory. Although it took some years for other labs to become proficient in and utilize this technique, it is now widely used by many laboratories around the world. A significant refinement to the original technique using the donor aorta to form the arterial anastomosis instead of the renal artery was develop...

”Automatic event extraction from fulltext resources is a combination of human language technology (HLT) and semantic web technologies. It can also be done on the base of purely statistical means with minimal linguistic knowledge”. This thesis introduces a semi-automated method based on the HLT approach. The method uses an existing information extraction system called ANNIE, A Nearly-New Informa...

Mammalian and bacterial cells sense and exert mechanical forces through the process of mechanotransduction, which interconverts biochemical and physical signals. This is especially important in contact-dependent signaling, where ligand-receptor binding occurs at cell-cell or cell-ECM junctions. By virtue of occurring within these specialized junctions, receptors engaged in contact-dependent sig...

Novel synthetic mimics of antimicrobial peptides have been developed to exhibit structural properties and antimicrobial activity similar to those of natural antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) of the innate immune system. These molecules have a number of potential advantages over conventional antibiotics, including reduced bacterial resistance, cost-effective preparation, and customizable designs. In...

Atoms of the radon daughters immediately after the radioactive decay of radon atoms have tendency to attach to condensation nuclei producing radioactive aerosols. Aerosols of size below 10 nm, composed of unattached ions or neutral atoms and molecular clusters associated with radon progeny atoms, are traditionally called unattached fraction. Aerosols above 10 nm up to greater than 1000 nm, with...

Branched amphiphilic peptide capsules (BAPCs) are peptide nano-spheres comprised of equimolar proportions of two branched peptide sequences bis(FLIVI)-K-KKKK and bis(FLIVIGSII)-K-KKKK that self-assemble to form bilayer delimited capsules. In two recent publications we described the lipid analogous characteristics of our BAPCs, examined their initial assembly, mode of fusion, solute encapsulatio...

Although radon dose to lungs comes mainly from shortlived radon daughters, most of its estimations for general population is based on the measurements of radon gas concentration instead of radon progeny and acceptance of a constant equilibrium factor between radon and its short-lived decay products. It is so because integrating passive measurements of radon gas concentration are simpler and che...

Neutron reflectometry (NR) is an emerging experimental technique for the structural characterization of proteins interacting with fluid bilayer membranes under conditions that mimic closely the cellular environment. Thus, cellular processes can be emulated in artificial systems and their molecular basis studied by adding cellular components one at a time in a well-controlled environment while t...

KALINA J. 2014: Gregor Mendel, his experiments and their statistical evaluation. Acta Musei Moraviae, Scientiae biologicae (Brno) 99(1): 87–99. – Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) is now generally acknowledged as the founder of modern genetics. He was among the first to make systematic use of mathematical methods in biology, employing just the simpler rules of probability theory to work out some of the...