Given the significant increases in the incidence of metabolic diseases, efficient strategies for preventing and treating of these common disorders are urgently needed. This includes the development of phytopharmaceutical products or functional foods to prevent or cure metabolic diseases. Plant extracts from edible biomaterial provide a potential resource of structurally diverse molecules that c...

The activities of extracellular enzymes, the proximate agents of decomposition in soils, are known to depend strongly on temperature, but less is known about how they respond to changes in precipitation patterns, and the interaction of these two components of climate change. Both enzyme production and turnover can be affected by changes in temperature and soil moisture, thus it is difficult to ...

Saplings of ozone-sensitive and ozone-tolerant birch (Betula pendula Roth.), clones B and C, respectively, were exposed to ozone concentrations that were 1.7-fold higher than ambient for one growing season under open-field conditions. Ambient air was used as the control treatment. In the ozone-sensitive clone B, there was an initial stimulation of leaf area growth in response to the ozone treat...

For the numerical simulation in continuum mechanics the Composite Finite Element (CFE) method allows an effective treatment of problems where material parameters are discontinuous across geometrically complicated interfaces. Instead of complicated and computationally expensive tetrahedral meshing, specialized CFE basis functions are constructed on a uniform hexahedral grid. This is a convenient...

We present an improved method for ultraviolet spectrophotometry of theophylline in serum. We studied various extraction techniques aimed at eliminating interferences from co-extractable serum constituents. In the resulting modified procedure, 1 ml of serum is required and a salt-solvent pair of ammonium sulfate and chloroform/hexane is used for extraction. The solvent forms the top phase after ...

The effects of methyl bromide (MB) concentration (16, 32, 48, or 64 g/m), fumigation temperature (15, 20, 25, or 30 C), and fumigation time interactions on the survival of Mediterranean fruit ßy,Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann), and oriental fruit ßy, Bactrocera dorsalis (Hendel) (Diptera: Tephritidae), eggs and Þrst and third instars were recorded. Increasing the fumigation temperature from 15 t...

The sensitivity and reliability of PCR for diagnostic and research purposes require efficient unbiased procedures of extraction and purification of nucleic acids. One of the major limitations of PCR-based tests is the inhibition of the amplification process by substances present in clinical samples. This study used specimens spiked with a known amount of plasmid pBKV (ATCC 33-1) to compare six ...

Cucumber plants (Cucumis sativus L.) were grown under controlled conditions and fumi­ gated with either 0 3, diluted automobile exhaust or a combination of both. The ratio of variable to maximum chlorophyll fluorescence (FJFm) was estimated as a measure of PSII activity Activities of the enzymes catalase, glutathione reductase and guaiacol-dependent peroxidase and contents of the antioxidants a...

Recently different methods are introduced for DNA extraction from bacteria. Bacterial DNA can be extracted using a commercial kit and conventional (e.g., boiling, phenol-chloroform and detergent methods). In the manual methods, chemically solution such as EDTA, SDS, NaCl, Tris hydrochloride, phenol-chloroform, proteinase K and lysozyme can be proposed (1). The phenol-chloroform DNA extraction m...