Repeated endothelial cell injury has been suggested as an initiating factor in atherogenesis. Dying or dead endothelial cells have been shown to make significant contributions to the local enhancement of transendothelial macromolecular transport. Since cigarette smoking is one of the major risk factors for atherosclerosis, we examined the hypothesis that smoking accelerates atherogenesis by inc...

The Drosophila larval tracheal system consists of a highly branched tubular organ that becomes interconnected by migration-fusion events during embryonic development. Fusion cells at the tip of each branch guide migration, adhere, and then undergo extensive remodeling as the tracheal lumen extends between the two branches. The Drosophila dead end gene is expressed in fusion cells, and encodes a...

In diverse bacterial lineages, multienzyme assemblies have evolved that are central elements of RNA metabolism and RNA-mediated regulation. The aquatic Gram-negative bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, which has been a model system for studying the bacterial cell cycle, has an RNA degradosome assembly that is formed by the endoribonuclease RNase E and includes the DEAD-box RNA helicase RhlB. Immu...

Techniques for the isolation of ovarian follicles and maturation of oocytes in vitro have enormous reproductive potential. Preservation of normal tissue function is vital. This study emphasizes the ultrastructure and viability of mechanically isolated bovine small (diameter 40-100 microm) preantral and large (140-450 microm) preantral/early antral follicles. Viability studies were performed for...

We developed a process of producing a dead-spore Bacillus thuringiensis Berliner var. kurstaki HD-1 formulation, Toarow CT, and studied several aspects t o improve the productivity of crystal toxin and the insecticidal potency after sterilization to kill spores. The production of cell mass or crystal toxin was highly influenced by aeration and agitation of the culture. The culture broth, within...

Atherosclerotic lesions are characterized by llpid Infiltration in regions wtth high rates of endothellal cell turnover. The present investigation was designed to elucidate the route of macromolecular transport across vascular endothelium. The aorta and vena cava of male Sprague-Dawley rats were perfusion-flxed after the intravenous in|ection of Evans-blue albumin (EBA) or horseradish peroxidas...

The viability of lactic acid bacteria is crucial for their applications as dairy starters and as probiotics. We investigated the usefulness of flow cytometry (FCM) for viability assessment of lactic acid bacteria. The esterase substrate carboxyfluorescein diacetate (cFDA) and the dye exclusion DNA binding probes propidium iodide (PI) and TOTO-1 were tested for live/dead discrimination using a L...

Aspergillus fumigatus is a ubiquitously present respiratory pathogen. The outcome of a pulmonary disease may vary significantly with fungal viability and host immune status. Our objective in this study was (1) to assess the ability of inhaled irradiation-killed or live A. fumigatus spores to induce allergic pulmonary disease and (2) to assess the extent to which inhaled dead or live A. fumigatu...

This paper proposes an adaptive approximation-based controller for uncertain strict-feedback nonlinear systems with unknown dead-zone nonlinearity. Dead-zone constraint is represented as a combination of a linear system with a disturbance-like term. This work invokes neural networks (NNs) as a linear-in-parameter approximator to model uncertain nonlinear functions that appear in virtual and act...

The ECTS grade transfer scale is an interface grade scale to help European universities, students and employers to understand the level of student achievement. Hence, the ECTS grading scale can be seen as an interface, transforming local scales to a common system where A-E denote passing grades. By definition, the ECTS grade transfer scale involves distribution of the passing students into five...