Although intestinal P-glycoprotein (P-gp) has been extensively studied in vitro and in animals, its activity and the consequences of P-gp inhibition for drug disposition and toxicity in humans are still difficult to accurately extrapolate from these studies. Moreover, existing in vitro models do not take into consideration that the intestine is heterogeneous with respect to P-gp expression. Rec...

1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Age-associated alterations in T cell function 4. T cell subsets 4.1. Other subset alterations: TH1 vs. TH2, Rhodamine 123 vs. R123, CD8 CD122 5. Thymus 5.1.Involution 5.2. Thymic productivity 6. Lifespan and homeostasis of T cell populations 6.1. Replicative senescence and sensitivity to apoptosis 7. T cell activation 7.1. TCR signaling 7.2. Costimulation 8. Influ...

Background: To model and thoroughly understand animal transcription networks, it is essential to derive accurate spatial and temporal descriptions of developing gene expression patterns with cellular resolution. Results: Here we describe a suite of methods that provide the first quantitative three-dimensional description of gene expression and morphology at cellular resolution in whole embryos....

Sperm capacitation involves functional changes, such as the removal or appearance of specific molecules and changes in the plasma membrane; the acrosome reaction (AR) is an exocytotic event induced by calcium influx, enabling the spermatozoa to penetrate the zona pellucida. These processes can be achieved only if the spermatozoa have good viability; indeed, determination of sperm viability is u...

The recent upsurge of antimony (Sb) resistance is a major impediment to successful chemotherapy of visceral leishmaniasis (VL). Mechanisms involved in antimony resistance have demonstrated an upregulation of drug efflux pumps; however, the biological role drug efflux pumps in clinical isolates remains to be substantiated. Thus, in this study, the functionality of drug efflux pumps was measured ...

To identify suitable cell lines for a mimetic system of in vivo blood-brain barrier (BBB) for drug permeability assessment, we characterized two immortalized cell lines, ECV304 and bEnd3 in the respect of the tightness, tight junction proteins, P-glycoprotein (P-gp) function and discriminative brain penetration. The ECV304 monoculture achieved higher transendothelial electrical resistance (TEER...

Pool boiling heat transfer has been extensively studied over decades, but the effect of boundary heating conditions on boiling received little attention. In this work, heat transfer coefficients during pool boiling of five different refrigerants (R123, R245fa, R236fa, R134a, and R22) on the outside surface of a smooth copper tube were measured at the saturation temperature of 6.7 C; water flows...