Japanese horse chestnut (Aesculus turbinata) seed extract inhibits the activity of cyclooxygenase (COX), but its active constituents have not been identified. In the present study, COX inhibitors were isolated from the hexane extract of this seed by means of 4 steps of liquid chromatography and were identified by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance. The COX inhib...

A series of new 2-aminonaphthoquinones and related compounds were synthesized and evaluated in vitro as trypanocidal and cytotoxic agents. Some tested compounds inhibited epimastigote growth and trypomastigote viability. Several compounds showed similar or higher activity and selectivity as compared with current trypanocidal drug, nifurtimox. Compound 4l exhibit higher selectivity than nifurtim...

In order to effectively and quickly answer queries in environments with distributed RDF/OWL, we present a query optimization algorithm to identify the potentially relevant Semantic Web data sources using structural query features and a term index. This algorithm is based on the observation that the join selectivity of a pair of query triple patterns is often higher than the overall selectivity ...

Bitmap indices are efficient data structures for processing complex, multi-dimensional queries in data warehouse applications and scientific data analysis. For high-cardinality attributes, a common approach is to build bitmap indices with binning. This technique partitions the attribute values into a number of ranges, called bins, and uses bitmap vectors to represent bins (attribute ranges) rat...

Classic studies of lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and visual cortex (V1) in carnivores and primates have found that a majority of neurons in LGN exhibit a center-surround organization, while V1 neurons exhibit strong orientation selectivity and, in many species, direction selectivity. This has led to the prevailing model that orientation and direction selectivity are computed anew in the cort...

Most studies of female choice have assumed that mating preferences are shared within a population or species. However, variation both within and among females exists in natural populations, and foraging history is among the many ways in which females may vary. Here, we used diet manipulations in an effort to understand how foraging history influences female mate choice. Immature Schizocosa wolf...

the efficient detection of charged biomolecules by biosensor with appropriate semiconducting nanomaterials and with optimum device geometry has caught tremendous research interest in the present decade. here, the performance of various label-free electronic biosensors to detect bio-molecules is investigated by simulation technique. silicon nanowire sensor, nanosphere sensor and double gate fiel...

A total of 115 different plant extracts from our collection, representing 96 plant species, have been evaluated for in vitro antileishmanial activity against L. amazonensis promastigotes. In addition, the extracts were screened for cytotoxic activity against BALB/c mouse macrophages in order to assess a selectivity index. Crude extracts that showed a selectivity index (CC50 for macrophage / IC5...

A peculiar aspect of the muscular organization of the human hand is that the main flexors and extensors of the fingers are muscles that each give rise to four parallel tendons that insert on all the fingers. It has been hypothesized that these multi-tendoned muscles are comprised of functional compartments, with each finger controlled by a discrete population of motor units. The purpose of this...

Lehky et al. (2011) provided a statistical analysis on the responses of the recorded 674 neurons to 806 image stimuli in anterior inferotemporalm (AIT) cortex of two monkeys. In terms of kurtosis and Pareto tail index, they observed that the population sparseness of both unnormalized and normalized responses is always larger than their single-neuron selectivity, hence concluded that the critica...