Boar taint is the unpleasant odour of meat derived from non-castrated male pigs, caused by the accumulation of androstenone and skatole in fat. Skatole is a tryptophan metabolite produced by intestinal bacteria in gut and catabolised in liver. Since boar taint affects consumer's preference, the aim of this study was to perform transcriptome profiling in liver of boars with divergent skatole lev...

UNLABELLED We report a case of an 84-year old female with granular cell atypical fibroxanthoma. The patient had an exophytic cutaneous tumor without ulceration localized on the left thigh. Histologically, the tumor consisted of a large epitheloid and spindle cells with a moderate to abundant amount of eosinophilic granular cytoplasm. The nuclei were irregular with coarse chromatin and some exhi...

A study of survival time of zygotes in utero and the relationship with parental phenotype of a series of genetic polymorphisms was carried out in 41 couples with habitual abortion. Variability of intrauterine survival time was found to be much higher between families than within families suggesting that several genetic entities contribute to the condition clinically defined as habitual abortion...

In response to a moisture gradient, roots exhibit hydrotropism to control the orientation of their growth. To exhibit hydrotropism, however, they must overcome the gravitropism that is dominant on Earth. We found that moisture gradient or water stress caused immediate degradation of the starch anchors, amyloplasts, in root columella cells of Arabidopsis and radish (Raphanus sativus). Namely, de...

Seven kinds of hypervariable DNA probes, which recognize hypervariable loci, were applied for individual identification of human bloodstains. Allelic frequencies and their confidence intervals among unrelated Japanese individuals were previously reported from our laboratory, and codominant segregation of the polymorphism was confirmed in family studies. One-month-old bloodstains from ten indivi...