background: laboratory bred sand flies are essential for the study of different biological phenomena including the transmis­sion dynamics of leishmania . the aim of the study was to determine the suitable situation for colonization and main­tenance of iranian strain of phlebotomus papatasi at laboratory conditions from an endemic focus of cutaneous leishmani­asis due to leishmania major . metho...

Chromatin from two Syrian hamster tissues: the Kirkman-Robbins hepatoma and the liver, has been separated into soluble (S) and insoluble (P) fractions. Both fractions contain the complete set of five main histones but differ in respect of H1 subfractions. The hepatoma chromatin is known to contain an unusual H1 subfraction, H1 slow [12, 13], probably identical with a similar subfraction present...

Apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death, is regulated by a number of inhibitory or stimulatory factors. In addition to the pro- and anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins, there is also a family of inhibitors of apoptosis protein (IAP). Survivin, a member of this IAP family, is selectively upregulated in most tumours. The objective of the present study was, therefore, to investigate the pr...

Neurogenic ATP and nitric oxide (NO) may play important roles in the physiological control of gastrointestinal motility. However, the interplay between purinergic and nitrergic neurons in mediating the inhibitory neurotransmission remains uncertain. This study investigated whether neurogenic NO modulates the purinergic transmission to circular smooth muscles of the hamster proximal colon. Elect...

The transduction of sodium salts occurs through a variety of mechanisms, including sodium influx through amiloride-sensitive sodium channels, anion-dependent sodium movement through intercellular junctions and unidentified amiloride-insensitive mechanisms. Characterizations of sodium transport in lingual epithelium mounted in Ussing chambers have focused almost exclusively on epithelia containi...

We investigated a possible contribution of nitric oxide (NO) and prostaglandins to the inhibitory effect of losartan on contractions to Ang I (10(-6) M) and Ang II (10(-7) M) with or without L-NAME (10(-4) M) or indomethacin (10(-5) M) in the aorta of WKY, SHR and hamster (n=7 each). Rings of thoracic aorta (2-mm long) were placed in a myograph (5 ml). Endothelium-dependent vasodilations were e...

Microscopic examination of individual mammalian cells embedded in agarose, subjected to electrophoresis, and stained with a fluorescent DNA-binding dye provides a novel way of measuring DNA damage and more importantly, of assessing heterogeneity in DNA damage within a mixed population of cells. With this method, DNA double-strand breaks can be detected in populations of cells exposed to X-ray d...

Evidence is given that the heart of the cardiomyopathic UM-X7.1 hamster has a lipid composition different from that of the same tissue isolated from animals of the Syrian hamster parent strain. Also, noncardiac tissues from cardiomyopathic and healthy hamsters exhibit significant compositional differences. On the basis of these preliminary observations, a comparative study of the hepatic biosyn...

Leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF) is a pleiotropic IL-6 family cytokine and its maternal uterine expression is critical for mouse blastocyst implantation. In the golden hamster (Mesocricetus auratus), although the blastocyst hatching phenomenon is quite interesting and LIF is shown to regulate hatching, information is not available on the embryonic and uterine expression of LIF and hormonal regu...