Search results for "corn"

No effect of lack of wood for acorn ant colonies development

2021

Acorn ants mostly inhabit cavities in fallen twigs and hollow acorns. Such places, e.g., dead wood, provide an attractive living resource for many groups of microorganisms, like fungi and bacteria, which can be important for ants. However, during experiments in laboratories, acorn ant colonies are typically kept without dead wood. During laboratory experi-ments, the preferences of the ant Temnothorax crassispinus for nest sites with pieces of dead wood were checked, and whether the presence of such wood influenced productivity. In binary choice tests, colonies had to choose a nest site when presented with two potential nest sites, one empty, or two cavities with different contents. The ant …

Kondycjonowanie kukurydzy do produkcji bioetanolu

2016

Insights from the genome of the biotrophic fungal plant pathogen Ustilago maydis.

2006

Ustilago maydis is a ubiquitous pathogen of maize and a well-established model organism for the study of plant-microbe interactions. This basidiomycete fungus does not use aggressive virulence strategies to kill its host. U. maydis belongs to the group of biotrophic parasites (the smuts) that depend on living tissue for proliferation and development. Here we report the genome sequence for a member of this economically important group of biotrophic fungi. The 20.5-million-base U. maydis genome assembly contains 6,902 predicted protein-encoding genes and lacks pathogenicity signatures found in the genomes of aggressive pathogenic fungi, for example a battery of cell-wall-degrading enzymes. Ho…

“In situ” corneal and contact lens thickness changes with high resolution OCT

2012

Purpose: To show the utility of high resolution spectral domain optical coherence tomography (HR SOCT) for the in situ evaluation of epithelial, stromal and contact lens (CL) thickness changes under closed-eye conditions without lens removal. Settings: Clinical and Experimental Optometry Research Lab, University of Minho, Portugal. Methods: Eight young healthy patients wore a thick soft CL during 90 minutes under closed-eye conditions and measures of epithelial and stromal corneal thickness were obtained at regular intervals using a HR SOCT (Copernicus HR, Optopol Tech. SA, Poland). Results: Minimal changes in epithelial thickness were detected with a transient statistically significant inc…

Early and late clinical landmarks of corneal dystrophies

2020

Abstract Corneal dystrophies (CDs) represent a heterogenous group of genetic diseases (Lisch and Weiss, 2019). The International Committee of Classification of Corneal Dystrophies (IC3D) distinguishes between 22 distinct forms of corneal dystrophy (CD) which are predominantly autosomal dominant, although autosomal recessive and X-chromosomal dominant and recessive patterns do exist. A detailed corneal examination of as many affected family members as possible can show the phenotypic differences of the various generations. There are few publications which describe the different CDs with regard to the early and late phenotypes. According to early and late phenotype, three types of CD are gene…

The Corneal Dystrophies—Does the Literature Clarify or Confuse?

2018

Corneal aberrations pre and post-application of new contact lens in the astigmatism after penetrating keratoplasty.

2007

Granulometric moments and corneal endothelium status

2001

Abstract Specular microscopy is a common practice in Ophthalmology. The corneal endothelium status is usually evaluated by means of the density, the hexagonality, the mean, the standard deviation and the coefficient of variation of cell areas. We propose to replace the cell area moments by the corresponding moments of a different probability distribution, the granulometric size distribution associated to a disc. All cells touching the frame are ignored by the area moments but used by the granulometric moments. Twenty images have been analyzed. When the size of the focused region is reduced, the area moments show a greater variation than the corresponding granulometric moments.

Granulometric analysis of corneal endothelium specular images by using a germ–grain model

2007

Specular microscopy is widely used to study the human corneal endothelium status in vivo. In this paper, the corneal endothelium is represented as a binary image composed of the cell inscribed circles. The granulometric distribution function of the complement of this image is used as a functional descriptor, which provides information about the shape, size and spatial arrangement of cells. Experimental evaluation using bootstrap techniques shows its ability to discriminate between controls and pathological cases. It represents a reliable and graphical alternative to the classical indices (cell density, hexagonality and coefficient of variation of cell areas), which behave poorly when detect…

Corneal Oxygen Supply Conditions

1976

Pronounced cornea hypoxia induces swelling and a loss of transparency. Hypoxia of longer duration causes necrosis, particularly of the corneal endothelium. These findings were observed after ligation of the cilial arteries and the arteria carotis interna, after reduction of oxygen tension on the anterior corneal surface as well as after prolonged wearing of ill-fitted contact lenses (11, 15, 18, 22, 23). Because the normal function of the corneal endothelium plays a central role in maintaining transparency, an insufficient endothelial oxygen supply can directly influence vision (3, 17).