OBJECTIVE Insulin release from pancreatic islet β cells should be tightly controlled to avoid hypoglycemia and insulin resistance. The cortical actin cytoskeleton is a gate for regulated exocytosis of insulin secretory granules (SGs) by restricting their mobility and access to the plasma membrane. Prior studies suggest that SGs interact with F-actin through their transmembrane cargo islet cell ...

Secretory granules (SGs) sequester significant calcium. Understanding roles for this calcium and potential mechanisms of release is hampered by the difficulty of measuring SG calcium directly in living cells. We adapted the Förster resonance energy transfer-based D1-endoplasmic reticulum (ER) probe to develop a unique probe (D1-SG) to measure calcium and pH in secretory granules. It significant...

BACKGROUND Population-based data examining the relationship between social participation (SP) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) are scarce. This study examined the cross-sectional relationship between SP and IADL in community-dwelling elderly persons. METHODS Self-administered questionnaires were mailed to 23 710 residents aged ≥65 years in Nara, Japan (response rate: 74.2%)....

Despite the ever increasing availability of computational resources, fully resolved simulations of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence are not going to be feasible for quite some time. For this reason, large eddy simulations (LES) have been introduced that only resolve large scales. In LES a low-pass filter is applied to the evolution equations, which introduces additional unknown terms. These...

BACKGROUND Leishmania is transmitted by female sand flies and deposited together with saliva, which contains a vast repertoire of pharmacologically active molecules that contribute to the establishment of the infection. The exposure to vector saliva induces an immune response against its components that can be used as a marker of exposure to the vector. Performing large-scale serological studie...

The EU Directive 2010/63/EU changed the requirements regarding the use of laboratory animals and raised important issues related to assessing the severity of all procedures undertaken on laboratory animals. However, quantifiable parameters to assess severity are rare, and improved assessment strategies need to be developed. Hence, a Sheep Grimace Scale (SGS) was herein established by observing ...

The combination of a high-order unstructured spectral difference (SD) spatial discretization scheme with sub-grid scale (SGS) modeling for large-eddy simulation is investigated with particular focus on the consistent implementation of a structural mixed model based on the scale similarity hypothesis. The difficult task of deriving a consistent formulation for the discrete filter within the SD e...

Introduction to Gaussian Random Function Simulation The so-called Gaussian Random Function simulation (GRFS) differs substantially from the Sequential Gaussian simulation (SGS) from GSLIB. GRFS more accurately reproduces distributions. It is typically faster than SGS, with additional efficiencies due to its parallel architecture. GRFS also has an option to run a fast collocated cosimulation – f...

It emerges that myosin Va plays multiple roles in the trafficking of SGs (secretory granules). In addition to a function in the capture and transport of newly formed SGs in the F-actin-rich cortex, myosin Va is implicated in late transport events of these organelles, which precede their exocytosis. Consistent with these roles, interactions of myosin Va with an array of well-known proteins invol...

A large eddy simulation (LES) a posteriori study is conducted for a temporal mixing layer which initially contains different species in the lower and upper streams and in which the initial pressure is larger than the critical pressure of either species. A vorticity perturbation, initially imposed, promotes roll-up and a double pairing of four initial spanwise vortices to reach a transitional st...