OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Surgical advancements rely heavily on validated animal models. The New Zealand White (NZW) rabbit is a widely used model for airway research, including regenerative medicine applications. Currently, the biomechanical properties of the normal rabbit trachea are not known. Our objective was to define these properties to assist in the standardization and understanding of futu...

  Background: Poisoning incidents, in both children and adolescents, are known to occur in New Zealand but little is known about the agents implicated.   Methods: All the calls received over the ten years between 2000 and 2009, by the National Poison Centre in New Zealand, were retrospectively reviewed. Calls related to cases involving those less than 19 years were included. The data were analy...

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of essential (EAAs) and non-essential (NEAAs) amino acids (AAs) at levels of 25 and 25 or 50 and 50 μl/ml, respectively, on in vitro developmental potential of rabbit embryos at 4and 8-cell stages. Total of 12 sexual mature New Zealand White (NZW) rabbit does and 3 fertile NZW bucks were used in this study. All does and bucks were kept under similar condi...

The paper contains a description of the Spoken Language Corpus of Swedish at the Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University (GSLC), and a summary of the various types of analysis and tools that have been developed for work on this corpus. Work on the corpus was started in the late 1970:s. It is incrementally growing and presently consists of 1.3 million words from about 25 different social ...

Serological tests for syphilis (STS), as well as being important aids in the diagnosis of syphilis in man, are important in the study of experimental syphilis in animals. Rabbits not infected with Treponema pallidum sometimes show reactivity in one or another of the several available serological tests for the disease and, with the exception of the enzootic rabbit-spirochaetosis caused by Trepon...

BACKGROUND Lycopene is the main carotenoid in tomatoes, where it is found in high concentrations. Strong epidemiological evidence suggests that lycopene may provide protection against cardiovascular diseases. We therefore studied the effects of lycopene on diet-induced increase in serum lipid levels and the initiation of atherosclerosis in New Zealand White (NZW) rabbits. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPA...

A previous communication (1) in this series reported that transient, very rapid macroglobulin antibody responses could be induced in rabbits by small doses of poliovirus (PV) antigen. 19S antibody appeared 8 to 16 hours following immunization in such responses. It was also observed that almost all normal rabbit sera (NRS) contained low background neutralizing activity to several viral antigens,...

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) and rabbit EPEC (RDEC-1) cause unique histopathological features on intestinal mucosa, including attaching/effacing (A/E) lesions. Due to the human specificity of EPEC, RDEC-1 has been used as an animal model to study EPEC pathogenesis. At least two of the previously identified EPEC-secreted proteins, EspA and EspB, are required for triggering host epith...

Retinoic acids, a group of natural and synthetic vitamin A derivatives, have potent antiproliferative and anti-inflammatory properties. Recently, retinoic acids were reported to inhibit Th1 cytokine production. We investigated the effects of retinoic acid on lupus nephritis in a model of NZB/NZW F(1) (NZB/W F(1)) mice. Three-month-old NZB/W F(1) mice were separated into two groups: one treated ...

INTRODUCTION Osteomyelitis is a severe orthopaedic complication which is difficult to diagnose and treat. Previous experimental studies mainly focussed on evaluating osteomyelitis in the presence of an implant or used a sclerosing agent to promote infection onset. In contrast, we focused on the longitudinal assessment of a nonimplant related osteomyelitis. METHODS An intramedullary tibial inf...