The deleterious consequences of inbreeding have been well documented. There are, however, few empirical studies that have examined the consequences of restoring heterozygosity and hence the fitness of inbred populations by conducting interpopulation crosses and measuring the performance of later-generation hybrids under field conditions. We conducted interpopulation crosses of 100 m to 2000 km,...

Advanced pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal malignant human diseases lacking effective treatment. Its extremely low survival rate necessitates development of novel therapeutic approach. Human neural stem cells (NSCs) are known to have tumor-tropic effect. We genetically engineered them to express rabbit carboxyl esterase (F3.CE), which activates prodrug CPT-11(irinotecan) into potent m...

PURPOSE To characterize the fundamental frequency and the frequency of the formants F1, F2, F3, and F4 from vocal emissions of amateur singers with metallic voice quality. METHODS There were 60 amateur female singers aged between 18 and 60 years old; 30 women with metallic voice quality forming the study group (SG) and 30 women without such a vocal quality forming control group (CG). The samp...

OBJECTIVE This study evaluated apical transportation associated with ProTaper Universal Fl, F2 and F3 rotary files in curved canais prepared by undergraduate students. MATERIAL AND METHODS Twenty mesial roots of mandibular molars with curvatures ranging between 25° and 35° were selected. Mesiobuccal canals were instrumented by twenty students with the ProTaper system (Dentsply-Maillefer, Ball...

The perception of the distinction between /r/ and /l/ by native speakers of American English and of Japanese was studied using natural and synthetic speech. The American subjects were all nearly perfect at recognizing the natural speech sounds, whereas there was substantial variation among the Japanese subjects in their accuracy of recognizing /r/ and /l/ except in syllable-final position. A lo...

House dust mites (HDM) are most important indoor allergens for humans. Der f3, one of the potent allergens with allergenicity, is derived from Dermatophagoides farina (D. farinae), and exhibits strong allergenicity that was confirmed in our previous work. The current study was undertaken to determine the localization of T-cell epitope of Der f3. We initially developed the T-cell fraction from B...

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the most common adult onset motor neuron disease. The etiology and pathogenic mechanisms of the disease remain unknown, and there is no effective treatment. Here we show that intrathecal transplantation of human motor neurons derived from neural stem cells (NSCs) in spinal cord of the SOD1G93A mouse ALS model delayed disease onset and extended life span of...

on transcriptional activation by serum response factor. A truncated form of the type II TGF-j3 receptor, created by deletion of the cytoplasmic kinase domain, acts as a dominant suppressor of TGF-f3 signal transduction in cultured cardiac muscle cells and may provide a suitable means to establish the functions of TGF-f3 in vivo. (Circ Res. 1993;73:783-791.)

Let n and r be positive integers. Suppose that a family F ⊂ 2[n] satisfies |F1 ∩ F2 ∩ F3| ≥ 2 for all F1, F2, F3 ∈ F . We prove that if w < 0.5018 then ∑ F∈F w |F |(1− w)n−|F | ≤ w2.

The objective of this study was to assess the difference in voice quality as defined by acoustical analysis using sustained vowel in laryngectomized patients in comparison with normal volunteers. This was designed as a retrospective single center cohort study. An adult tertiary referral unit formed the setting of this study. Fifty patients (40 males) who underwent total laryngectomy and 31 norm...