The investigation of wildlife gastrointestinal microbiomes by next-generation sequencing approaches is a growing field in microbial ecology and conservation. Such studies often face difficulties in sample preservation if neither freezing facilities nor liquid nitrogen (LQN) are readily available. Thus, in order to prevent microbial community changes because of bacterial growth after sampling, p...

Aims: In gastric cardia cancer, the spleen is usually removed when the tumor is resected. This allows thorough lymph node dissection in the splenic hilus. However, the effect of splenectomy on patient survival is controversial. This study gives insight into the effect of splenectomy in radical surgery for gastric cardia cancer. Methodology: We reviewed the records of 348 patients who underwent ...

Insects often used as accumulation indicators of hazardous elements. Pitfall traps with ethylene glycol as trapping fluid are frequently used to collect insects. We studied the effect of glycol and preservation with ethanol on the elemental composition of hand collected firebugs. Control samples were stored in a freezer and the following treatments were used: insect kept in trapping fluid for 2...

Background and Objectives. The intestinal mucosa is extremely sensitive to ischemia. Better intestinal preservation is the first step to improve the results of intestinal transplantation. The aim of the study is to investigate the effect of cold Lifor solution on preservation of swine small bowel. Methods. Swine ileum segments (200 cm) were allotransplanted heterotopically after 9-hour cold sto...

In this paper, a new and efficient edge-preserving algorithm is presented for color contrast enhancement in CIE Luv0 color space. The proposed algorithm not only can enhance the color contrast as the previous algorithm does, but also has an edge-preservation effect. In addition, the spurious edge points occurred due to the color contrast enhancement can be well reduced using the proposed algori...

Soliton breakup occurring at the planar boundary separating two Kerr focusing and defocusing media is analyzed within the framework of the Helmholtz theory where the full angular content of the problem is preserved. We show that the number of solitons resulting from bright soliton breakup depends on the soliton angle of incidence, contrary to the predictions of previous paraxial analyses. The g...

BACKGROUND It has recently been shown that tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4), an essential cofactor of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), reduces ischemia-reperfusion myocardial injury. The aim of this study was to determine if supplementation with BH4 after cardiac arrest followed by cold heart preservation would exert a cardioprotective effect against ischemia-reperfusion injury. MATERIALS AND METHODS Is...

Two 900-year records of annual accumulation at South Pole are compared to evaluate the origin and significance of observed variations. Despite difficulties establishing absolute timescales, due to problems identifying annual layer markers, the two records can be correlated with confidence after moderate smoothing. This correlation shows that over the time period considered (1050-1956 A.D.) no c...