The plant-specific NAC transcription factors play important roles in plant response to drought stress. Here, we have compared the expression levels of a subset of GmNAC genes in drought-tolerant DT51 and drought-sensitive MTD720 under both normal and drought stress conditions aimed at identifying correlation between GmNAC expression levels and drought tolerance degree, as well as potential GmNA...

To estimate HCV seroprevalence in subpopulations of women delivering live-born infants in the North Thames region in England in 2012, an unlinked anonymous (UA) cross-sectional survey of neonatal dried blood spot samples was conducted. Data were available from 31467 samples from live-born infants received by the North Thames screening laboratory. Thirty neonatal samples had HCV antibodies, corr...

The development of sophisticated multimedia applications requires accurate performance evaluation tools to efficiently design and manage future high bandwidth networks. These tools have to be accurate, in order to closely match the statistical characteristics of network traffic, easy to implement, and efficient. VBR compressed video traffic is expected to represent most of the multimedia traffi...

Excessive microglial activation often contributes to inflammation-mediated neurotoxicity in the ischemic penumbra during the acute stage of ischemic stroke. Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) has been reported to induce microglial activation via the NF-κB pathway. Isoflurane preconditioning (IP) can provide neuroprotection and inhibit microglial activation. In this study, we investigated the roles of ...

We investigated the mechanism of the Toll-like receptor 4- (TLR4-) mediated PI3K/AKT/GSK-3β signaling pathway in rat hepatocytes apoptosis induced by LPS. The cultured rat hepatocytes were treated with LPS alone or first pretreated with TLR4 inhibitor, AKT inhibitor, and GSK-3β inhibitor, respectively, and then stimulated with the same dose of LPS. Cell viability, cell apoptotic rate, and apopt...

To estimate HCV seroprevalence in subpopulations of women delivering live-born infants in the North Thames region in England in 2012, an unlinked anonymous (UA) cross-sectional survey of neonatal dried blood spot samples was conducted. Data were available from 31467 samples from live-born infants received by the North Thames screening laboratory. Thirty neonatal samples had HCV antibodies, corr...

The suppression of thermoacoustic combustion instabilities represents one of the main goals in the design of reliable high-performances combustion chambers. Unstable dynamics arise when a non-linear coupling is established between the acoustic field and the flame front generating high-amplitude and low-frequency pressure and heat release oscillations, associated with the excitation of the combu...

Accurate measurement of wood volume is a very important task at each stage of woodworking process beginning with estimation of volume of cut trees and finishing with determining the volume of resulting product. In most cases, current technology of measurement is based on inexact manual procedures and gives rather rough data. To introduce a new measurement technology in woodworking industry 3D i...