Lichens are widely used to assess the atmospheric pollution by heavy metals and radionuclides. However, few studies are available in publications on using lichens to qualitatively assess the atmospheric pollution levels. The paper presents research results applying epiphytic lichens as bio-monitors of quantitative atmospheric contamination with uranium. The observations were conducted during 2....

Antagonism of the discriminative stimulus properties of 10 mglkg cocaine was studied in rats by use of the dopamine Dl antagonist SCH 23390 and the Dl antagonist haloperidol. Whereas SCH 23390 and haloperidol were by themselves unable to antagonize the cueing properties of cocaine, the combination of both dopamine antagonists resulted in a complete blockade of the cocaine cue. In the presence o...

BACKGROUND Heliotropium indicum is used as a traditional remedy for hypertension in Ghana. The aim of the study was to evaluate the anti-glaucoma potential of an aqueous whole plant extract of H. indicum to manage experimentally-induced glaucoma. METHODS The percentage change in intraocular pressure (IOP), after inducing acute glaucoma (15 mLkg(-1) of 5 % dextrose, i.v.), in New Zealand White...

In this study, concentrations of cadmium using 3778 samples encompassing the total size Spain (about 505 km2) were investgated. Two novel spatial methods namely Moran eigenvector spatially varying coefficient (MESVC) and filtered unconditional quantile regression (SF-UQR) employed with aim avoiding problem local collinearity which is prevalent in models. Additionally, coefficients applied to as...

Private vegetable gardens are often contaminated with elevated levels of heavy metals (HM). Bioindication, using the visible symptoms developing in leaves, can provide simple, cost-effective and reliable detection of soil pollution. In this experiment five species of vegetables from different families were exposed to soil contaminated with HM dust given as copper / zinc / cadmium/ lead = 640 /3...

Objectives. We investigated whether amlodipine could improve angiogenic responses in a diabetic rat model of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) through improving bone marrow endothelial progenitor cell (EPC) mobilization, in the same way as angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors. Methods. After induction of AMI by coronary artery ligation, diabetic rats were randomly assigned to receive perind...

The experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of dietary vitamin K on survival, growth and tissue vitamin K concentrations of abalone, Haliotis discus hannai. Eight purified diets were formulated to provide a series of graded levels of menadione sodium bisulfite (MSB) (0-320 mgkg(-1) diet). The brown alga, Laminaria japonica, was used as a control diet. Abalone juveniles of similar si...

OBJECTIVE To study the impact of obesity on postoperative morbidity and outcome following surgical resection of primary oesophageal adenocarcinoma (EADC). METHODS From a prospective database, we compared clinicopathological findings (age, gender, surgical approach, tumour differentiation and stage), postoperative mortality, morbidity, length of hospitalisation, disease-free survival (DFS) and...

Biological uranium reduction was investigated using bacteria isolated from a uranium mine in Limpopo, South Africa. Background uranium concentration in soil from the mine was determined to be 168 mgkg(-1) much higher than the typical background uranium concentration in natural soils (0.30-11.7 mgkg(-1)). Therefore it was expected that the bacteria isolated from the site were resistant to U(VI) ...

AIMS We investigated whether the treatment with anthocyanins prevents the scopolamine-induced memory deficits and whether ectonucleotidase activities and purine levels are altered in the cerebral cortex (CC) and hippocampus (HC) in this model of mnemonic deficit in rats. MAIN METHODS The animals were divided into 4 experimental groups: control (vehicle), anthocyanins (Antho), scopolamine (SCO...