The influenza virus A/Japan/305/57 hemagglutinin (HA) can be converted from a protein that is essentially excluded from coated pits into one that is internalized at approximately the rate of uptake of bulk membrane by replacing the HA transmembrane and cytoplasmic sequences with those of either of two other glycoproteins (Roth et al., 1986. J. Cell Biol. 102:1271-1283). To identify more precise...

In order to characterize chronically accelerated erythropoiesis, we studied the ultrastructure of bone marrow and spleen of ha/ha and sph/sph mice, two mutants with profound hemolytic anemia secondary to deficiency of the erythrocyte membrane protein spectrin. The marrows and spleens of both varieties were extremely erythropoietic and were without histological abnormalities directly related to ...

Tissue engineering is faced with an uphill challenge to design a platform with appropriate topography and suitable surface chemistry, which could encourage desired cellular activities and guide bone tissue regeneration. To develop such scaffolds, composite nanofiber scaffolds of nHA and sHA with PLGA were fabricated using electrospinning technique. nHA was synthesized using precipitation method...

Polyetheretherketone (PEEK) is a high-performance thermoplastic biomaterial which is currently used in a variety of biomedical orthopaedic applications. It has comparable tensile and compressive strength to cortical bone with favourable biocompatibility. However, natural grade PEEK-OPTIMA has shown insufficient bioactivity and limited bone integration. Bioactive PEEK composites (e.g., PEEK/calc...

Background In vivo Cardiac Diffusion Tensor Imaging (cDTI) has great potential to depict the microstructure of the myocardium, with Mean Diffusivity (MD), Fractional Anisotropy (FA), and Helix Angle (HA) maps. Quantitative analysis of these parameters might help disease diagnosis, however HA is particularly difficult to quantify as it varies across the myocardial wall. To overcome this, we deve...