The manufacturing processes of royal demolition explosive (RDX), or hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine, have resulted in serious water contamination. As a potential carcinogen, RDX can cause a broad range of harmful effects to humans and animals. The ovine rumen is capable of rapid degradation of nitroaromatic compounds, including RDX. While ruminal RDX-degrading bacteria have been identif...

Bovine digital dermatitis (BDD) is a severe infectious cause of lameness which has spread through dairy cattle populations worldwide, causing serious welfare and agricultural problems. Spirochetes are the main organisms implicated and have previously proven difficult to isolate. This study aimed to isolate and characterise the range of spirochetes associated with BDD in the UK. Twenty-three spi...

OBJECTIVES The cytokines interleukin (IL)-1beta and IL-6 are modulators of the neuroimmune axis and have been implicated in neuronal cell death cascades after ischemia or infection. Previous work has shown that some cross-species conservation exists between human and rodent blood-brain barrier (BBB) transport systems. To further assess cross-species conservation of cytokine transport across the...

Prions are unconventional infectious agents thought to be primarily composed of PrP(Sc), a multimeric misfolded conformer of the ubiquitously expressed host-encoded prion protein (PrP(C)). They cause fatal neurodegenerative diseases in both animals and humans. The disease phenotype is not uniform within species, and stable, self-propagating variations in PrP(Sc) conformation could encode this '...

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or prion diseases, are fatal degenerative disorders of the central nervous system that affect humans and animals. Prions are nonconventional infectious agents whose replication depends on the host prion protein (PrP). Transmission of prions to cultured cells has proved to be a particularly difficult task, and with a few exceptions, their experimental p...

Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae, a bacterial species that specifically affects ovine and goat, is the cause of ovine infectious pleuropneumonia. We cloned, sequenced and analyzed heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) (dnaK) gene of M. ovipneumoniae. The full length open reading frame of the M. ovipneumoniae HSP70 gene consists of 1812 nucleotides, with a G+C content of 34.16%, encoding 604 amino acids. Compar...

Canine brucellosis, caused by Brucella canis, is an important cause of reproductive failure, particularly in kennels. This organism causes abortions, stillbirths, epididymitis, orchitis and sperm abnormalities in dogs. Although dogs that have been spayed or neutered do not have reproductive signs, they occasionally develop other conditions such as ocular disease and discospondylitis. B. canis c...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of follicle stimulating hormone (fsh) on survival, activation and growth of ovine primordial follicles using histological studies. pieces of ovine ovarian cortex were obtained and cultured for 6 days in minimum essential medium supplemented with or without fsh (50 ng/ml). these fragments were then process to be used for histology compar...

Brucella ovis causes ram contagious epididymitis, a disease for which a specific vaccine is lacking. Attenuated Brucella melitensis Rev 1, used as vaccine against ovine and caprine brucellosis caused by B. melitensis, is also considered the best vaccine available for the prophylaxis of B. ovis infection, but its use for this purpose has serious drawbacks. In this work, two previously characteri...

Background: Different culture media are used for in vitro maturation of ovine oocyte. The Weymouth medium are used for in vitro maturation of rat and mice oocytes with very low levels of supplementation (Just FBS, while to acquire the good results in TCM hormone, and serum supplementation and in some cases growth factor are necessary to gain the optimized results. The aim of the present study w...