BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE House dust mites are the most common cause of sensitization in wheezing children in most parts of the world. The aim of this study was to investigate prevalence of sensitization and the levels of specific immunoglobulin E (IgE) to Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus (Der p) in wheezing children in Taipei city and central rural Taiwan. METHODS A total of 3546 children were en...

GABA-receptor-operated chloride ion channels are widely distributed on membranes of insect nervous tissue (for a review, see Sattelle, 1990). For example, in the cockroach Periplaneta americana radioligand binding (Lummis and Sattelle, 1986), autoradiography (Lummis and Sattelle, 1985) and GABA-activated ^Cl flux (Wafford et al. 1987) studies have demonstrated the presence of GABAoperated chlor...

Effective antimicrobial strategies are essential adaptations of insects to protect themselves, their offspring, and their foods from microbial pathogens and decomposers. Larvae of the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, sanitize their cockroach hosts, Periplaneta americana, with a cocktail of nine antimicrobials comprising mainly (R)-(-)-mellein and micromolide. The blend of these antimi...

BACKGROUND Current practice guidelines state that protease-rich fungal and insect extracts can be combined when preparing immunotherapy vaccines, but data supporting the stability of allergens in these mixtures have not been reported. OBJECTIVE To determine the stabilities and compatibilities of Alternaria alternata and German cockroach allergens in mixtures with other high-protease fungal an...

Complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) of two cockroach species, Periplaneta australasiae and Neostylopyga rhombifolia, 15,605 bp and 15,711 bp in length, respectively, were determined. As reported for other cockroach mitogenomes, the two mitogenomes possessed typical ancestral insect mitogenome gene composition and arrangement. Only several small intergenic spacers were found: one, which...

UNLABELLED We characterized the prevalence of cockroach allergen exposure in a nationally representative sample of U.S. homes and assessed risk factors for elevated concentrations. DESIGN We used data from the National Survey of Lead and Allergens in Housing, a population-based cross-sectional survey. PARTICIPANTS Participants were residents of 831 U.S. homes in the survey. EVALUATIONS/ME...

An all-chain-wireless brain-to-brain system (BTBS), which enabled motion control of a cyborg cockroach via human brain, was developed in this work. Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain-computer interface (BCI) was used in this system for recognizing human motion intention and an optimization algorithm was proposed in SSVEP to improve online performance of the BCI. The cyborg...

In a microvillar photoreceptor, absorption of an incident photon initiates a phototransduction reaction that generates a depolarizing light-induced current (LIC) in the microvillus. Although in-depth knowledge about these processes in photoreceptors of the fruitfly Drosophila is available, not much is known about their nature in other insect species. Here, we present description of some basic p...