Synthetic GH secretagogues stimulate GH release through binding to a recently cloned specific GH secretagogue receptor (GHS-R). The endogenous ligand of this receptor may be part of a new endocrine pathway controlling GH secretion. Two different receptor variants, type 1a and 1b, have been described that differ in their 3'-terminal amino acids. We investigated the genomic structure and transcri...

BACKGROUND Ghrelin is a 28-amino acid octanolyated peptide, synthesised primarily in the stomach. It stimulates growth hormone release, food intake and exhibits many other diverse effects. Our group have previously determined that ghrelin inhibited human contractility in vitro. The aim of this study therefore, was to investigate the expression of ghrelin, its receptor, the growth hormone secret...

Assessment of acute eye irritation potential is part of the international regulatory requirements for testing of chemicals. The objective of the CON4EI (CONsortium for in vitro Eye Irritation testing strategy) project was to develop tiered testing strategies for eye irritation assessment for all drivers of classification. A set of 80 reference chemicals (38 liquids and 42 solids) was tested wit...

OBJECTIVE Ghrelin, a recently identified 28-amino acid peptide is a potent GH secretagogue (GHS) produced predominantly by the stomach. Ghrelin stimulates GH secretion through binding to the GHS receptor in the hypothalamus and pituitary. In addition to the GH-releasing action, ghrelin has been found to be a powerful orexigenic factor. To assess the direct in vitro effects of ghrelin on human p...

This paper discusses a genetic implementation of the growing hyperspheres classifier (GHS) for highdimensional data classification. The main idea of the GHS classifier consists in data separation by n-dimensional hyperspheres properly spread over the training data. First, the idea of training data representation is described. Then a brief description of a previous first representation by neural...

Background Independent treatment centres (ITCs) are a growing phenomenon in many healthcare systems. Focus factory theory predicts that ITCs provide high quality healthcare with low prices, through specialisation, high-volume and routine. This study examines if ITC care outperforms general hospital (GH) care within a regulated compe...

Objectives were to investigate the effects of prolonged gestational and/or postnatal heat stress on performance and carcass composition of market weight pigs. Pregnant gilts were exposed to gestational heat stress (GHS, 28°C to 34°C, diurnal) or thermal neutral (18°C to 22°C, diurnal) conditions during the entire gestation or during the first or second half of gestation. At 14 wk of age (58 ± 5...

1. Skin corrosion refers to the production of irreversible damage to the skin manifested as visible necrosis through the epidermis and into the dermis, following the application of a test material [as defined by the United Nations (UN) Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS)] (1). This Test Guideline provides an in vitro procedure allowing the identificatio...

In this paper we present and evaluate a parallel algorithm for solving a minimum spanning tree (MST) problem for supercomputers with distributed memory. The algorithm relies on the relaxation of the message processing order requirement for one specific message type compared to the original GHS (Gallager, Humblet, Spira) algorithm. Our algorithm adopts hashing and message compression optimizatio...