AIM To evaluate the use of human serum (HS) in supporting the in vitro and in vivo proliferation of human conjunctival epithelial cells, and compare it with fetal bovine serum (FBS) and bovine pituitary extract (BPE). METHODS Conjunctival epithelial cells were cultivated in media supplemented with HS (5%, 10%), FBS (5%, 10%), and BPE (70 microg/ml, 140 microg/ml). The colony forming efficienc...

Background and Objectives Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent stem cells that can be isolated from umbilical cords and are therapeutically used because of their ability to differentiate into various types of cells, in addition to their immunosuppressive and anti-inflammatory properties. Fetal bovine serum (FBS), considered as the standard additive when isolating and culturing MSCs, ha...

Bovine viral diarrhea viruses (BVDV) are members of the Pestivirus genus within the family Flaviviridae. Based on antigenic and nucleotide differences, BVDV are classified into two recognized species, BVDV-1 and BVDV-2. More recently, a new putative pestivirus species, tentatively called "HoBi-like", has been associated with bovine viral diarrhea. HoBi-like viruses were first identified in feta...

BACKGROUND Peritoneal dialysis has a number of complications including increased blood glucose. Although exercise has been suggested to resolve this complication, most patients are not active. The present study aimed at determining the effects of twice-weekly, 40-min sessions of pedaling on a stationary bicycle on mean fasting blood sugar (FBS) and 2-h postprandial blood sugar (PPBS) among cont...

A critical step towards certifying safety-critical systems is to check their conformance to hard realtime requirements. A promising way to achieve this is by building the systems from pre-verified components and verifying their correctness in a compositional manner. We previously reported a formal approach to verifying function blocks (FBs) using tabular expressions and the PVS proof assistant....

OBJECTIVES This study aims to report our experience in the management of foreign body (FB) impaction in esophagus in the Ear-Nose-Throat Clinic, University Clinical Center of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. PATIENTS AND METHODS Seventy-one patients (44 males, 27 females; mean age 32.99±28.57 years; range 1 to 81 years) who admitted to our clinic between January 2003 and December 2013 with a hi...

Atrial fibrosis has been implicated in the development and maintenance of atrial arrhythmias, and is characterized by expansion of the extracellular matrix and an increased number of fibroblasts (Fbs). Electrotonic coupling between atrial myocytes and Fbs may contribute to the formation of an arrhythmogenic substrate. However, the role of these cell-cell interactions in the function of both nor...

In this study we have shown that Viable AC-2, a medium based on the ultrafiltrate fraction of bovine colostrum and adult bovine serum, can be used successfully as a fetal bovine serum (FBS) substitute in the culture of several anchorage-dependent and independent cell lines. Of the 15 cell lines cultured in 8% Viable AC-2 in microplates, 10 reached the maximum cell density of 65%-123% of that in...

Bioassays were performed to assess the effects of different levels of growth medium supplementation with fetal bovine serum (FBS), fish fry extract (FE), combinations of FBS and FE, and addition of insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) and fibroblast growth factor (FGF) on the proliferation of brown bullhead catfish cells (BB line). Treatments (n = 4) were: 2.5, 5, 10, and 15.0% FBS or FE and 5/...

This paper proposes a comprehensive schema to represent an agent’s social knowledge using the Function – Behaviour – Structure (FBS) schema. Although this schema has originally been developed to represent knowledge about design objects, it is sufficiently abstract to also describe knowledge about agents. This paper shows how such an FBS view can be useful to support the interaction of situated ...