BACKGROUND PrPSc, the only known constituent of prions, the infectious agents causing prion diseases, can be detected by real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC). However, there is no efficient method to quantify the amount of PrPSc by RT-QuIC. RESULTS Here we introduce quantitative RT-QuIC (qRT-QuIC) to quantify with high accuracy minute amounts of PrPSc in the brain and various periph...

Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is the most frequently used serum for the cultivation of mammalian cells. However, since animal-derived materials might not be appropriate due to safety issues, allogeneic human serum (HS) has been used to replace FBS, particularly for the culture of human cells. While there has been a debate about the advantages of HS, its precise effect on human adult stem cells have ...

As the incidence of osteoarthritis and other degenerative joint conditions continues to grow, rehabilitation via tissue engineering is becomingly increasingly attractive as an alternative to traditional surgical interventions. Chapters 2 and 3 of this thesis are specifically concerned with cartilage tissue engineering, while chapter 4 is relevant to bone and osteochondral tissue engineering. Th...

The stochastic formulation of multiexciton generation (MEG) rates is extended to provide access to MEG efficiencies in nanostructures containing thousands of atoms. The formalism is applied to a series of CdSe/CdS seeded nanorod heterostructures with different core and shell dimensions. At energies above 3Eg (where Eg is the band gap), the MEG yield increases with decreasing core size, as expec...

BACKGROUND Thousands of babies are born with congenital heart defects that require surgical repair involving a prosthetic implant. Lack of growth in prosthetic grafts is especially detrimental in pediatric surgery. Cell seeded biodegradable tissue engineered grafts are a novel solution to this problem. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the feasibility of seeding human induced plur...

We have developed a novel, two-layered, collagen matrix seeded with chondrocytes for repair of articular cartilage. It consists of a dense collagen layer which is in contact with bone and a porous matrix to support the seeded chondrocytes. The matrices were implanted in rabbit femoral trochleas for up to 24 weeks. The control groups received either a matrix without cells or no implant. The best...

In this paper a new approach to CT based investigation of pulmonary airways is introduced. Especially a new fully automated algorithm for airway tree segmentation is proposed. The algorithm is based on 3D seeded region growing. However in opposite to traditional approaches region growing is applied twice: firstly – for detecting main bronchi, secondly – for localizing low order parts of the air...