INTRODUCTION Medullary sponge kidney is a congenital anomaly characterized by diffuse ectasy of the collecting tubules of one or both kidneys. It is usually diagnosed in the second or third decade of life. CASE PRESENTATION Distal renal tubular acidosis is commonly observed in patients with medullary sponge kidney. We describe here a 50-day-old Egyptian Caucasian girl with medullary sponge ki...

Emphysema is a chronic lung disease characterized by alveolar enlargement and tissue loss. Tissue engineering represents an attractive potential for regeneration of several organ systems. The complex three-dimensional architectural structure of lung parenchyma requiring connections of alveolar units to airways and the pulmonary circulation makes this strategy less optimistic. In the present stu...

Wastewater irrigation is a very important resource for heavy metal pollution in soil and then accumulation in vegetable crops. In this study, a polyethylenimine (PEI)-grafted gelatin sponge was prepared to effectively adsorb heavy metals during wastewater irrigation. Based on the strong water adsorption ability, wastewater remained in the PEI-grafted gelatin sponge for a sufficient time for the...

Marine sponges often contain diverse and abundant microbial communities, including bacteria, archaea, microalgae, and fungi. In some cases, these microbial associates comprise as much as 40% of the sponge volume and can contribute significantly to host metabolism (e.g., via photosynthesis or nitrogen fixation). We review in detail the diversity of microbes associated with sponges, including ext...

The biosynthetic origins of the isocyanide and isothiocyanate functional groups in the marine sponge metabolites diisocyanoadociane (1), 9-isocyanopupukeanane (10) and 9-isothiocyanatopupukeanane (11) are probed by the use of [(14)C]-labelled precursor experiments. Incubation of the sponge Amphimedon terpenensis with [(14)C]-labelled thiocyanate resulted in radioactive diisocyanoadociane (1) in...

In classical works, Hurewicz and Menger introduced two diagonalization properties for sequences of open covers. Hurewicz found a combinatorial characterization of these notions in terms of continuous images. Recently, Scheepers has shown that these notions are particular cases in a large family of diagonalization schemas. One of the members of this family is weaker than the Hurewicz property an...

Using a portion of the Continuum Hypothesis, we prove that there is a Menger-bounded (also called o-bounded) subgroup of the Baire group Z, whose square is not Menger-bounded. This settles a major open problem concerning boundedness notions for groups, and implies that Menger-bounded groups need not be Scheepers-bounded.

INTRODUCTION Several biomaterials can be used in ear surgery to pack the middle ear or support the graft. The absorbable gelatin sponge is the most widely used, but it may produce fibrosis and impair ventilation of the middle ear. OBJECTIVE This experimental study aimed to investigate the inflammatory effects of the sugarcane biopolymer sponge (BP) in the rat middle ear compared with absorbab...

Infaunal soft-bottom invertebrates benefit from the presence of sediment, but sedimentation is potentially harmful for hard-bottom dwellers. Most sponges live on hard bottom, but on coral reefs in the Red Sea, the species Biemna ehrenbergi (Keller, 1889) is found exclusively in soft-bottom lagoons, usually in the shallowest part. This location is a sink environment, which increases the depositi...

Cyanobacteria represent one of the most common members of the sponge-associated bacterial community and are abundant symbionts of coral reef ecosystems. In this study we used Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and molecular techniques (16S rRNA gene marker) to characterize the spatial distribution of cyanobionts in the widely dispersed marine intertidal sponge Hymeniacidon perlevis along th...