PURPOSE Senile scleral plaques (SSP) are sharply demarcated greyish areas located just anterior to the insertions of the horizontal rectus muscles and thus are frequently encountered during transscleral intravitreal injections. The aim of this study was to characterize SSP using enhanced depth imaging spectral domain anterior segment optical coherence tomography (OCT) in a cohort of patients at...

It has been well documented how language-specific cues may be used for word segmentation. Here, we investigate what role a language-independent phonological universal, the sonority sequencing principle (SSP), may also play. Participants were presented with an unsegmented speech stream with non-English word onsets that juxtaposed adherence to the SSP with transitional probabilities. Participants...

The stable signal peptide (SSP) of the GP-C envelope glycoprotein of the Junín arenavirus plays a critical role in trafficking of the GP-C complex to the cell surface and in its membrane fusion activity. SSP therefore may function on both sides of the lipid membrane. In this study, we have investigated the membrane topology of SSP by confocal microscopy of cells treated with the detergent digit...

PURPOSE Stone size and location are generally considered the most important factors associated with spontaneous ureter stone passage (SSP). Several parameters related to inflammatory changes have been identified as predictors associated with SSP. Our aim was to investigate the predictive role of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) for SSP. MATERIALS AND METHODS A retrospective review was per...

The PCR-based methodology applied to multiple-locus variable numbers of tandem repeat (VNTR) analysis was recently shown to be a useful technique for the molecular typing of clinical isolates of several bacterial species. We have adopted this method for the molecular typing of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Five staphylococcal VNTR loci (sdr, clfA, clfB, ssp, and spa) were subject...

The present study provides data on contamination level with Campylobacter in poultry and poultry products after air chilling. Using cell culture and PCR we detected Campylobacter in the following proportion of chicken samples studied: 38.3% and 40.8%, respectively. Campylobacter contamination occurred highest in liver samples (53.3%), followed by the skin (46.6%), tight (36.6%) and breast (16.6...

Hereditary haemochromatosis is a common genetic disorder that causes hyperabsorption of dietary iron, leading to increased deposition and various organic diseases. Early diagnosis is important if effective treatment is to be applied and the iron overload corrected before the onset of clinical symptoms. Recently, a candidate gene has been identified in which a single point mutation shows a very ...

We typed 100 unrelated, healthy Poles from the region of Lower Silesia for HLA-C using low-resolution polymerase chain reaction sequence-specific primers (PCR-SSP) and compared the observed allele frequencies with data published for other human populations. Poles appeared to be most similar to the Germans and English more distant from the French, Catalans and Basques and most dissimilar to non-...

Autoimmune mechanisms are likely involved in the pathogenesis of idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (IDC) and components of MHC may serve as markers for the propensity to develop immune-mediated myocardial damage. This study was conducted to investigate the possible association between HLA-DQA1, -DQB1 alleles and IDC in Han population from northern China by using PCR-based sequence-specific prim...

The effector function of natural killer (NK) cells is modulated by surface expression of a range of killer-cell immunoglobulin-like receptors (KIRs) that interact with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class I ligands. We describe the use of real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays that allow easy and quick detection of 16 KIR genes and the presence/absence of KIR-ligands based on allelic d...