BACKGROUND Adequate light is essential for vision during direct laryngoscopy. The ISO 7376:2009 standard specifies the minimal illuminance for laryngoscopes. No studies have objectively examined the relationship between laryngoscope illumination and visual acuity during laryngoscopy. METHODS We measured the near visual performance of 50 anesthesiologists during direct laryngoscopy using near ...

PURPOSE To compare three different pupillometers (Colvard, Procyon, and Neuroptics) for determining pupil diameter at 0.04 and 0.4 lux ambient illumination. METHODS In 92 eyes of 46 healthy volunteers, pupil diameter was measured at 0.04 and 0.4 lux. After dark adaptation for 2 minutes, measurements were performed with each device by two examiners. Interobserver agreement, instrument agreemen...

Sequence analysis of the bacterial luminescence (lux) genes has proven effective in helping resolve evolutionary relationships among luminous bacteria. Phylogenetic analysis using lux genes, however, is based on the assumptions that the lux genes are present as single copies on the bacterial chromosome and are vertically inherited. We report here that certain strains of Photobacterium leiognath...

Vibrio fischeri quorum sensing involves the LuxI and LuxR proteins. The LuxI protein generates the quorum-sensing signal N-3-oxohexanoyl-l-homoserine lactone (3OC6-HSL), and LuxR is a signal-responsive transcriptional regulator which activates the luminescence (lux) genes and 17 other V. fischeri genes. For activation of the lux genes, LuxR binds to a 20-base-pair inverted repeat, the lux box, ...

PURPOSE To investigate whether regulation of rhodopsin levels as a response to changed lighting environment is performed by autophagic degradation of opsin in rod inner segments (RISs). METHODS Groups of albino rats were kept in 3 lux or 200 lux. At 10 weeks of age, one group was transferred from 3 lux to 200 lux, another group was switched from 200 lux to 3 lux, and two groups remained in th...

Just as engineers learnt to harness the power of electrons in transistors and microchips—which revolutionized modern society—physicists and biologists are now learning how to tame photons. Their work is generating exciting new possibilities for optical microscopy, with a resolution and level of detail hitherto undreamt of. Biophotonics is a new and exciting research field that is already delive...

Circadian clocks allow organisms to anticipate daily changes in the environment to enhance overall fitness. Transcription factors (TFs) play a prominent role in the molecular mechanism but are incompletely described possibly due to functional redundancy, gene family proliferation, and/or lack of context-specific assays. To overcome these, we performed a high-throughput yeast one-hybrid screen u...