Enzymatic antioxidant activities (superoxide dismutase, catalase, glutathione peroxidase, glutathione reductase) and lipid peroxidation were determined in different tissues (gills, heart, digestive tract, liver, white muscle, skin, red blood cells, swimbladder) of trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and sturgeon (Acipenser naccarii). Total tissue antioxidant activity was, except for catalase, generally...

A phylogenetic hypothesis is presented illustrating relationships among 23 extant sturgeon species based on nucleotide data from five mitochondrial genes (cytochrome b, NADH5, control region, 16S, and 12S). The tree supports our previous hypotheses regarding relationships among species of Acipenser and Huso. The introduction of Scaphirhynchus and Pseudoscaphirhynchus to the analysis does not ch...

Scott Sturgeon has claimed to undermine the principal argument for Physicalism, in his words, the view that “actuality is exhausted by physical reality” (Sturgeon 1998, p. 410). In noting that actuality is exhausted by physical reality, the Physicalist is not claiming that all that there is in actuality are those things identified by physics. Rather the thought is that actuality is made up of a...

Sturgeon (order Acipenserformes) provide an ideal taxonomic context for examination of genome duplication events. Multiple levels of ploidy exist among these fish. In a novel microsatellite approach, data from 962 fish from 20 sturgeon species were used for analysis of ploidy in sturgeon. Allele numbers in a sample of individuals were assessed at six microsatellite loci. Species with approximat...

We report the isolation of a novel vitamin K-dependent protein from the calcified cartilage of Adriatic sturgeon (Acipenser nacarii). This 10.2-kDa secreted protein contains 16 gamma-carboxyglutamic acid (Gla) residues in its 74-residue sequence, the highest Gla percent of any known protein, and we have therefore termed it Gla-rich protein (GRP). GRP has a high charge density (36 negative+16 po...

The effect of starvation and re-feeding was investigated on growth, hematology and biochemical parameters in juvenile Persian sturgeon (Acipenser persicus). Three hundred and seventyfive fish (108±0.63 g) were divided into five feeding groups. The control group (C) was fed to satiation three times a day during the experiment. The four groups were starved for 1 (W1), 2 (W2), 3 (W3), and 4 (W4) w...

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...