BACKGROUND Respiratory infections with sputum production are a major reason for physician visits, diagnostic testing, and antibiotic prescription in the United States. We sought to determine whether the simple characteristic of sputum color provides information that impacts resource utilization such as laboratory testing and prescription of antibiotics. METHODS Out-patient sputum samples subm...

OBJECTIVE To develop a flexible method of separation and quantification of immunohistochemical staining by means of color image analysis. STUDY DESIGN An algorithm was developed to deconvolve the color information acquired with red-green-blue (RGB) cameras and to calculate the contribution of each of the applied stains based on stain-specific RGB absorption. The algorithm was tested using dif...

We evaluated the effect of six different histologic stains on the productivity of PCR amplification of DNA isolated from paraffin-embedded tissue samples. The tissue was collected from glass slides by microdissection techniques, whereby tiny portions of tissue are visually identified through a microscope and selectively resected for subsequent DNA extraction and PCR amplification. We found that...

Denervation or inactivity is known to decrease the mass and alter the phenotype of muscle and the mechanics of tendon. It has been proposed that a shift in the collagen of the extracellular matrix (ECM) of the muscle, increasing type III and decreasing type I collagen, may be partially responsible for the observed changes. We directly investigated this hypothesis using quantitative real-time PC...

introduction: skeletal staining is an important part of anatomical studies which can evaluate macroscopic disorders in bones and cartilages development. the aim of the present article is to illustrate two distinct protocols by all details in order to stain skeletal system of the lab animals in all ages of their lives so it becomes easy for future studies in this field. methods: in this paper, s...

Abstract Sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors reduce cardiovascular mortality in patients with and without diabetes mellitus, but underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Autophagy is an important cardioprotective mechanism under acute stress conditions, excessive autophagy can accelerate myocardial cell death leading to autosis. In this study we evaluated the role of empagliflozin (E...

Various imaging techniques have been widely used to study intervertebral disc (IVD) biology, among which histological methods are most common as they are indispensable tools to retrieve structural information. Stainings using Alcian blue-fast red and safranin-O-fast green are popular but they have limitations in delineating the complex structures of the IVD comparing to their use for articular ...

While reports suggest a single dose of senolytics may improve vasomotor function, the structural and functional impact of long-term senolytic treatment is unknown. To determine whether long-term senolytic treatment improves vasomotor function, vascular stiffness, and intimal plaque size and composition in aged or hypercholesterolemic mice with established disease. Senolytic treatment (intermitt...

The ratiometric fluorescent sensor based on furoquinoline has been designed and synthesized, and not only exhibits a large Stokes shift of 199 nm in a mixture of C(2)H(5)OH-H(2)O (v/v = 8 ratio 2, 10 mM Tris-HCl, pH = 7.3), but can selectively detect zinc ions in the presence of competing metal ions with a red-shift of 75 nm; moreover, cell stain experiments show that can readily reveal a chang...

Cell-permeable DNA stains are popular markers in live-cell imaging. Currently used DNA stains for live-cell imaging are either toxic, require illumination with blue light or are not compatible with super-resolution microscopy, thereby limiting their utility. Here we describe a far-red DNA stain, SiR-Hoechst, which displays minimal toxicity, is applicable in different cell types and tissues, and...