West Nile virus (WNV)-associated deaths of American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) chicks have been recognized at various nesting colonies in the United States since 2002. We evaluated American white pelican nesting colonies in Sheridan County, Montana, USA, for an association between WNV-positive pelican carcasses and human West Nile neuroinvasive disease. Persons in counties hostin...

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) is a widely used technique in pathology to evidence protein expression in tissue samples. However, this staining technique is known for presenting inter-batch variations. Whole slide imaging in digital pathology offers a possibility to overcome this problem by means of image normalisation techniques. In the present paper we propose a methodology to objectively evaluat...

High throughput technologies, such as gene expression arrays and protein mass spectrometry, allow one to simultaneously evaluate thousands of potential biomarkers that could distinguish different tissue types. Of particular interest here is distinguishing between cancerous and normal organ tissues. We consider statistical methods to rank genes (or proteins) in regards to differential expression...

PURPOSE Despite the controversy regarding clinical efficacy, dental hygienists use the diode laser as an adjunct to non-surgical periodontal therapy. The technique to maximize successful laser therapy outcome is controversial as well. The purpose of this review is to explore the scientific foundation of the controversy surrounding the use of the diode laser as an adjunct to non-surgical periodo...

Cellular alignment plays a critical role in functional, physical, and biological characteristics of many tissue types, such as muscle, tendon, nerve, and cornea. Current efforts toward regeneration of these tissues include replicating the cellular microenvironment by developing biomaterials that facilitate cellular alignment. To assess the functional effectiveness of the engineered microenviron...

Immune induction by successful vaccine formulations seems to involve stimulation of both humoral and cellular arms of immunity. Nevertheless, CD8+ CTLs are of critical relevance in the context of intracellular infection and tumor for many reasons. The task of exerting antipathogen activity by CD8+ T cells, which principally function to control and eradicate intracellular pathogens, is enabled b...

This review describes the different microtechniques developed for the extraction and purification of amyloid proteins from small specimens of fresh and formalin fixed tissues. These procedures differ with respect to solvent type, extraction conditions, and protein purification strategy. The advantages and disadvantages of the different microtechniques are discussed by taking into consideration ...

A heterokaryon is a tissue type composed of cells containing genetically different nuclei. Although heterokaryosis is commonly found in nature, an understanding of the evolutionary implications of this phenomenon is largely lacking. Here, we use the filamentous ascomycete Neurospora tetrasperma to study the interplay between nuclei in heterokaryons across vegetative and sexual developmental sta...

The searching of human housekeeping (HK) genes has been a long quest since the emergence of transcriptomics, and is instrumental for us to understand the structure of genome and the fundamentals of biological processes. The resolved genes are frequently used in evolution studies and as normalization standards in quantitative gene-expression analysis. Within the past 20 years, more than a dozen ...

The diet-tissue discrimination factor is the amount by which a consumer's tissue varies isotopically from its diet, and is therefore a key element in models that use stable isotopes to estimate diet composition. In this study we measured discrimination factors in blood (whole blood, red blood cells and plasma), liver, muscle and feathers of Double-crested Cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) for ...