We praise the article by Mokhtari-Zaer et al. (2015) published in the Avicenna Journal of Phytomedicine on the effects of saffron on smooth muscle activity (Mokhtari-Zaer et al., 2015). It was a well-designed and interesting study on the therapeutic properties of Crocus sativus which is a precious plant cultivated in our country. We do believe that along with all other medicinal effects, saffro...

Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation status of lung cancer is important because it indicates induction of EGFR-TKI (tyrosine kinase inhibitor) treatment. EGFR mutation has been reported to be strongly related with never-smoker, female, adenocarcinoma and Asians (Lynch et al., 2004; Paez et al., 2004; Pao et al., 2004). There is a striking difference in the frequency of EGFR mutation...

Nonlinear block-oriented systems, including the Hammerstein, Wiener and feedbacknonlinear systems have attracted considerable research interest both from the industrial and academic environments (Bai, 1998), (Greblicki, 1989), (Latawiec, 2004), (Latawiec et al., 2003), (Latawiec et al., 2004), (Pearson & Pottman, 2000). It is well known that orthonormal basis functions (OBF) (Bokor et al., 1999...

Presence of tumor cells in blood of patients with metastatic carcinomas has been associated with poor progression free and overall survival (Cohen et al., 2008; Cristofanilli et al., 2004; de Bono et al., 2008). Assessment of treatment targets on circulating tumor cells (CTC) before initiation of therapy may provide a means to guide therapy (Attard et al., 2009; de Bono et al., 2007; Hayes et a...

Mitochondrial genomes represent an important data source for phylogenetic analyses. Thirty-seven genes encoding for 13 protein subunits, 2 rRNAs and 22 tRNAs are usually present in a bilaterian mitochondrial genome (Boore, 1999; Wolstenholme, 1992). Additionally, a noncoding control region can be identiWed in most cases, probably bearing the transcription initiation sites. DiVerent rates of evo...

Polymer materials have been used for electronic, optical and bio micro/nano devices. Polymer device fabrication technologies based on replication methods including hot embossing (Becker & Heim, 2000; Park et al., 2003; Shinohara et al., 2007b), injection molding (Becker et al., 1986; Svedberg et al., 2003), ultraviolet (UV) imprinting (Haisma et al., 1996; Kawaguchi et al., 2007; Shinohara et a...

Neural stem cells have the capacity to self-renew, proliferate, and give rise to lineage-restricted neuronal and/or glial progenitor cells and postmitotic specialized daughter cells. Neural progenitor cells located in the subgranular zone (SGZ) of the dentate gyrus (DG) give rise to immature neurons. These then migrate to the granule cell layer, where they differentiate into granule neurons tha...

This expectation is supported by the results of many observational studies with ISO, SCUBA, and now Spitzer, which provide evidence of strong evolution in number density and luminosity of dusty starbursts at z>1 (Elbaz et al. 2002; Chapman et al. 2003; Marleau et al. 2004; Yan et al. 2004; Le Floch et al. 2004). Therefore, high-z, dusty infrared luminous sources are believed to play a critical ...

that act as posttranscriptional repressors by binding to the 3′UTR of target mRNAs (Lee et al. 1993; Reinhart et al. 2000; Bartel 2004; Kloosterman and Plasterk 2006). In animals, mature miRNAs are generated from a primary transcript (pri-miRNA) through sequential cleavage by nucleases belonging to the RNAse III family. Initially, Drosha cleaves the pri-miRNA and excises a stem-loop precursor (...

We explore the large angular scale temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to homogeneous local dust-filled voids in a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe with a cosmological constant. In comparison with the equivalent dust-filled void model in the Einstein-de Sitter background, we find that the anisotropy for compensated asymptotically expanding local voids c...