OBJECTIVES One of the risks in middle ear surgery is high frequency hearing loss. It is believed that manipulations on the middle ear ossicles with the instruments may cause overstimulation of the inner ear and damage of the hear cells. Controversy arises whether temporary separation of the ossicles has any impact on middle ear transfer function and hearing threshold after surgery. The aim of t...

DNA fingerprinting has become an important tool for diversity assessment and varietal identification in plant breeding programs. Semi- random PCR primers targeting intron-exon splice junctions (ISJ) were used to evaluate the potential of these markers in identification and classification of rice genotypes. A total of 12 ISJ primers were used for screening fourteen Egyptian rice genotypes, inclu...

A retrospective analysis to quantify age-related changes of the incudo-malleolar joint (IMJ) and incudo-stapedial (ISJ), analyse in air-bone gap (ABG) with age, was performed. Defined histologic parameters 153 IMJ 106 ISJ from subjects aged birth 70 years were correlated age. Additionally, audiograms 1760 ears 974 other 20 80 retrospectively analysed ABG The space (age group 0 10 compared 61 ye...

The genus Dactylis, an important forage crop, has a wide geographical distribution in temperate regions. While this genus is thought to include a single species, Dactylis glomerata, this species encompasses many subspecies whose relationships have not been fully characterized. In this study, the genetic diversity and phylogenetic relationships of nine representative Dactylis subspecies were exa...

The Iceberg SemiJoin (ISJ) of two datasets R and S returns the tuples in R which join with at least k tuples of S. The ISJ operator is essential in many practical applications including OLAP, Data Mining and Information Retrieval. In this paper we consider the distributed evaluation of Iceberg SemiJoins, where R and S reside on remote servers. We developed an efficient algorithm which employs B...

A wide variety of signaling pathways regulate immune and stress response in invertebrates and vertebrates. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are extensively utilized model organisms for studies of such signaling pathways in invertebrates. Intriguingly, major signaling pathways in immune response in Drosophila and C. elegans, as represented by the Toll...

Autophagy is a cellular pathway that leads to the degradation of proteins and organelles. This process is usually involved in the maintenance of cell homeostasis when the organism experiences nutrient starvation, but in holometabolous insects autophagy also intervenes in the demolition of larval tissues and organs during metamorphosis. This review summarizes the current knowledge about autophag...

Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) belongs to the aldehyde dehydrogenases (ALDH) family, an ancestral group of enzymes responsible for aldehyde detoxification in several organisms. The BADH enzyme catalyzes the irreversible oxidation of betaine aldehyde to glycine betaine (GB) an important osmoptrotector and osmoregulator accumulated in response to cellular osmotic stress. The BADH enzymes h...