Background: Quantitative fluorescence-polymerase chain reaction (QF-PCR) is an inexpensive and accurate method for the prenatal diagnosis of aneuploidies that applies short tandem repeats (STRs) as a chromosome-specific marker. Despite its apparent advantages, QF-PCR is not applicable in all cases due to the presence of uninformative STRs. This study was carried out to investigate the efficienc...

purpose: to report five cases of wolfram syndrome, an autosomal recessive neurodegenerative disease with ِdiabetes insipidus, diabetes mellitus, optic atrophy, and deafness (didmoad syndrome). patients and findings: all of the five patients had diabetes mellitus and optic atrophy. four patients had hearing loss. in spite of persistence of polyuria and polydipsia, diabetes insipidus had been prev...

we proposed to use artificial channels in laboratory assays to expose periphyton to substancesreleased in rural environments in order to test the following hypotheses 1) a high concentration of humicsubstances decreases the biofilm biomass and alters its metabolism; 2) periphyton biomass and metabolism increase in response to nutrient addition in spite of the previous high nutrient concentratio...

despite a quite short early history, computational drug design and discovery methods can now be efficient in reducing costs and speeding up drug developing procedure. melanocortin-4 receptor (mc4r) is a g protein-coupled receptor implicated in the regulation of body weight. despite its clinical reputation, there is a lack of in-depth knowledge about structure and behavior of mc4r in lipid bilay...

Background Good drug regulation requires an effective system for monitoring and inspection of manufacturing and sales units. In India, despite widespread agreement on this principle, ongoing shortages of drug inspectors have been identified by national committees since 1975. The growth of India’s pharmaceutical industry and its large export market makes the problem more acute.   Methods The foc...

Choosing a favourite image is very difficult to do, not least because different images are important to us for different reasons. I have decided to focus here on an image that is not only intrinsically beautiful, but that also emphasizes the importance of looking and seeing properly when trying to understand the world around us. For me, this image, the adaxial surface of the petal of Veronica c...