Search results for "techniques"
showing 10 items of 4426 documents
Absence of muscarinic modulation of vasopressin release from the isolated rat neurohypophysis
1975
1. Isolated rat neurohypophyses were incubated in Locke solution at 37°C and the vasopressin output into the medium determined by bioassay. 2. Potassium chloride 60 mM caused a 9-fold increase in the rate of vasopressin release that was abolished when calcium chloride was omitted from the Locke solution. 3. Acetylcholine 5.5×10−4 M neither alone nor in the presence of atropine 2.9×10−6 M changed the “resting” release of vasopressin. 4. Neither acetylcholine 5.5×10−4 M nor oxotremorine 10−4 and 3×10−4 M altered the vasopressin release evoked by potassium chloride 60 mM. 5. In contrast to the peripheral adrenergic nerve fibres, the secretory terminal fibres of the neurohypophysis do not appea…
The brainstem efferent acoustic chiasm in pigmented and albino rats
2015
Abstract The present study examined whether structural peculiarities in the brain-efferent pathway to the organ of Corti may underlie functional differences in hearing between pigmented and albino individuals of the same mammalian species. Pigmented Brown-Norway rats and albino Wistar rats received unilateral injections of an aqueous solution of the retrograde neuronal tracer Fluorogold (FG) into the scala tympani of the cochlea to identify olivocochlear neurons (OCN) in the brainstem superior olivary complex. After five days, brains were perfusion-fixed and brainstem sections were cut and analyzed with respect to retrogradely labeled neurons. Intrinsic neurons of the lateral system were lo…
Semiautomatic growth analysis of multicellular tumor spheroids.
2011
Multicellular tumor spheroids (MCTS) are routinely employed as three-dimensional in vitro models to study tumor biology. Cultivation of MCTS in spinner flasks provides better growing conditions, especially with regard to the availability of nutrients and oxygen, when compared with microtiter plates. The main endpoint of drug response experiments is spheroid size. It is common practice to analyze spheroid size manually with a microscope and an ocular micrometer. This requires removal of some spheroids from the flask, which entails major limitations such as loss of MCTS and the risk of contamination. With this new approach, the authors present an efficient and highly reproducible method to an…
Oscillatory Changes of the Heterogeneous Reactive Layer Detected with the Motional Resistance during the Galvanostatic Deposition of Copper in Sulfur…
2015
Metallic copper was galvanostatically deposited on quartz|gold resonant electrodes by applying a constant current in a 0.5 M CuSO4/0.1 M H2SO4 aqueous solution. Galvanostatic copper deposition is one of the best methodologies to calibrate the electrochemical quartz crystal microbalances (EQCM), a gravimetric sensor to evaluate changes in mass during the electrochemical reactions through the Sauerbrey equation. The simultaneous measurement of mass, current density, and motional resistance by an EQCM with motional resistance monitoring allows us to characterize the processes occurring on the electrode surface and at the interfacial regions with unprecedented detail. During the galvanostatic c…
Synthesis of aryl azides: A probe reaction to study the synergetic action of ultrasounds and ionic liquids
2011
Abstract The combined effect of ultrasounds and ionic liquids was used to perform the synthesis of aryl azides by nucleophilic aromatic substitution in ionic liquid/[1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium][N 3 ] binary mixtures. The ultrasounds efficiency was analyzed as a function of the substrate and of the ionic liquid structure. In the first case, both 6π and 10π electrons aryl halides were considered. As far as the ionic liquid structure is concerned, both aromatic and aliphatic ionic liquids were taken into account. Among aromatic cations, the effects due to different ability in giving hydrogen bond or π–π interactions were considered. The use of a geminal ionic liquid having an aromatic spacer …
Metabolomics of Human Amniotic Fluid and Maternal Plasma during Normal Pregnancy
2016
Metabolic profiles of amniotic fluid and maternal blood are sources of valuable information about fetus development and can be potentially useful in diagnosis of pregnancy disorders. In this study, we applied 1H NMR-based metabolic profiling to track metabolic changes occurring in amniotic fluid (AF) and plasma (PL) of healthy mothers over the course of pregnancy. AF and PL samples were collected in the 2nd (T2) and 3rd (T3) trimester, prolonged pregnancy (PP) until time of delivery (TD). A multivariate data analysis of both biofluids reviled a metabolic switch-like transition between 2nd and 3rd trimester, which was followed by metabolic stabilization throughout the rest of pregnancy proba…
CUSHAW2-GPU: Empowering Faster Gapped Short-Read Alignment Using GPU Computing
2014
We present CUSHAW2-GPU to accelerate the CUSHAW2 algorithm using compute unified device architecture (CUDA)-enabled GPUs. Two critical GPU computing techniques, namely intertask hybrid CPU-GPU parallelism and tile-based Smith-Waterman map backtracking using CUDA, are investigated to facilitate fast alignments. By aligning both simulated and real reads to the human genome, our aligner yields comparable or better performance compared to BWA-SW, Bowtie2, and GEM. Furthermore, CUSHAW2-GPU with a Tesla K20c GPU achieves significant speedups over the multithreaded CUSHAW2, BWA-SW, Bowtie2, and GEM on the 12 cores of a high-end CPU for both single-end and paired-end alignment.
Culture and Real-time Polymerase Chain reaction sensitivity in the diagnosis of invasive meningococcal disease: Does culture miss less severe cases?
2019
BackgroundInvasive meningococcal disease (IMD) is a highly lethal disease. Diagnosis is commonly performed by culture or Realtime-PCR (qPCR).AimsOur aim was to evaluate, retrospectively, whether culture positivity correlates with higher bacterial load and fatal outcome. Our secondary aim was to compare culture and qPCR sensitivity.MethodsThe National Register for Molecular Surveillance was used as data source. Cycle threshold (CT), known to be inversely correlated with bacterial load, was used to compare bacterial load in different samples.ResultsThree-hundred-thirteen patients were found positive for Neisseria meningitidis by qPCR, or culture, or both; 41 died (case fatality rate 13.1%); 1…
Novel M. tuberculosis specific IL-2 ELISpot assay discriminates adult patients with active or latent tuberculosis
2018
Background Tuberculosis (TB) still is a major worldwide health problem, with 10.4 million new cases in 2016. Only 5–15% of people infected with M. tuberculosis develop TB disease while others remain latently infected (LTBI) during their lifetime. Thus, the absence of tests able to distinguish between latent infection and active tuberculosis is one of the major limits of currently available diagnostic tools. Methods A total of 215 patients were included in the study as active TB cases (n = 73), LTBI subjects (n = 88) and healthy persons (n = 54). Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated from each patient and the LIOSpot® TB anti-human IL-2 ELISpot assay was performed to test …
Association between COX-2 rs 6681231 genotype and interleukin-6 in periodontal connective tissue. A pilot study.
2014
[Objectives] The aim of this pilot study was to investigate associations between IL-6 and COX-2 expression in gingival biopsies and both clinical diagnosis and genotypes in the IL-6 and COX-2 genes. [Design] A case-control study included 41 gingival biopsies obtained from Caucasian patients grouped according to clinical diagnosis of gingival health (n = 10), gingivitis (n = 15) or chronic periodontitis (n = 16). Immunohistochemistry analyses were performed to determine COX-2 expression in lamina propria, IL-6 expression in lamina propria and gingival epithelium and level of inflammatory cell infiltrate. Individual DNA was extracted and genotyped by real-time PCR for IL6 SNPs rs 2069827 and …