The alkaline Comet assay has shown high diagnostic value to determine male reproductive health and prognostic ability to predict ART success. Here, spermatozoon was analysed in 47 fertile donors and 238 patients, including 132 couples undergoing ART [semen was collected: Group I - within 3 months of their treatment (n = 79); and Group II - 3 months prior to their treatment (n = 53)]. We introdu...

Insulin signaling regulates many facets of animal physiology. Its dysregulation causes diabetes and other metabolic disorders. The spindle checkpoint proteins MAD2 and BUBR1 prevent precocious chromosome segregation and suppress aneuploidy. The MAD2 inhibitory protein p31(comet) promotes checkpoint inactivation and timely chromosome segregation. Here, we show that whole-body p31(comet) knockout...

An improved forced-precession model of Comet 46P/Wirtanen is presented. The nongravitational motion of the comet has been investigated based on the forced precession model of the rotating cometary nucleus. The least squares method applied to observational equations allows us to determine six basic nongravitational parameters: A, η, I, φ, f p , and s together with six orbital elements. The solut...

The status of the solid materials and mineralogical and petrological results of the Stardust mission to comet 81P/Wild 2 are presented. This mission became the first successful samplereturn mission since the Apollo project. This time the challenges were much less related to the availability of state-of-the-art analytical capabilities. Still, dedicated tools had to be developed to manipulate the...

In this paper, I introduce the light curves of comets, bright comets or interesting comets with peculiar light curves, observed during a year between 2005 March and 2006 February. My web page "Comet Catalog" also introduces the light curves of comets, including ones not described in this paper. This graph represents the brightness change with a heliocentric brightness, corrected magnitude as ob...

We present millimetre and submillimetre observations of comet C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) undertaken near perihelion with the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory and the 30m telescope and Plateau-de-Bure interferometer of the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique. From a spectral molecular survey, six new cometary molecular species have been identified for the first time in a comet: SO, SO2, HC3N, ...

The comet assay is a valuable experimental tool aimed at mapping DNA damage in human cells in vivo for environmental and occupational monitoring, as well as for therapeutic purposes, such as storage prior to transplant, during tissue engineering, and in experimental ex vivo assays. Furthermore, due to its great versatility, the comet assay allows to explore the use of alternative cell types to ...

The overwhelming majority of studies that have found increased cancer risk associated with functional deficits in DNA repair used a case-control design, in which measurements were made after cancer diagnosis. However, there are concerns about whether the cancer itself or cancer treatment affected the conclusions (reverse causation bias). We assessed the effect of cancer diagnosis among 26 breas...

Photoionization of neutral molecules in the coma surrounding a comet produces heavy ions which contaminate and mass-load the solar wind. Cometary ion distribution functions in the vicinity of comet Giacobini-Zinner (G/Z) are calculated using a Monte Carlo method. The distribution function calculated behind the shock has both cold (= 2 keV) and hot (-40 keV) components.

a COMET+, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3AN, UK b COMET+, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1RJ, UK c Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami, Miami, FL 33149, USA d Colombian Institute of Geology and Mining (INGEOMINAS), Bogotá DC, Colombia e Colombian Institute of Geology and Mining (INGEOMINAS),...