Haematology in mice after weekly blood sampling for 7 weeks

No abstract availabl

Haematologic and Clinical Chemical values in 3 and 6 months old Göttingen minipigs

Blood samples were collected from sixty healthy Göttingen minipigs. fifteen males and fifteen females at the age of three months and fifteen males and fifteen females at the age of six months. The samples were taken at the breeder’s facilities. The samples were analysed for nineteen haematological and twenty~six clinical chemical parameters. Means, standard deviations and lowest and highest values are presented. In general the parameters were comparable with those reponed for other breeds of miniature and domestic swine. The white blood cell count, the percentages of neutrophils and monocytes and serum globulin levels were lower in these microbiologically defined minipigs compared with conventionally rearedpigs and minipigs. Three litter mates had a complex of abnormally high serum creatine kinase, lactate dehydrogenase, uspartate aminotransterase and alanine aminotmnsferase levels

Nonperturbative late time asymptotics for heat kernel in gravity theory

Recently proposed nonlocal and nonperturbative late time behavior of the heat kernel is generalized to curved spacetimes. Heat kernel trace asymptotics is dominated by two terms one of which represents a trivial covariantization of the flat-space result and another one is given by the Gibbons-Hawking integral over asymptotically-flat infinity. Nonlocal terms of the effective action generated by this asymptotics might underly long- distance modifications of the Einstein theory motivated by the cosmological constant problem. New mechanisms of the cosmological constant induced by infrared effects of matter and graviton loops are briefly discussed.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, final version, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Finding needles in haystacks: linking scientific names, reference specimens and molecular data for Fungi

DNA phylogenetic comparisons have shown that morphology-based species recognition often underestimates fungal diversity. Therefore, the need for accurate DNA sequence data, tied to both correct taxonomic names and clearly annotated specimen data, has never been greater. Furthermore, the growing number of molecular ecology and microbiome projects using high-throughput sequencing require fast and effective methods for en masse species assignments. In this article, we focus on selecting and re-annotating a set of marker reference sequences that represent each currently accepted order of Fungi. The particular focus is on sequences from the internal transcribed spacer region in the nuclear ribosomal cistron, derived from type specimens and/or ex-type cultures. Re-annotated and verified sequences were deposited in a curated public database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), namely the RefSeq Targeted Loci (RTL) database, and will be visible during routine sequence similarity searches with NR_prefixed accession numbers. A set of standards and protocols is proposed to improve the data quality of new sequences, and we suggest how type and other reference sequences can be used to improve identification of Fungi

Globally aligned photomosaic of the Lucky Strike hydrothermal vent field (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 37°18.5′N) : release of georeferenced data, mosaic construction, and viewing software

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 9 (2008): Q12009, doi:10.1029/2008GC002204.We present a georeferenced photomosaic of the Lucky Strike hydrothermal vent field (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 37°18′N). The photomosaic was generated from digital photographs acquired using the ARGO II seafloor imaging system during the 1996 LUSTRE cruise, which surveyed a ∼1 km2 zone and provided a coverage of ∼20% of the seafloor. The photomosaic has a pixel resolution of 15 mm and encloses the areas with known active hydrothermal venting. The final mosaic is generated after an optimization that includes the automatic detection of the same benthic features across different images (feature-matching), followed by a global alignment of images based on the vehicle navigation. We also provide software to construct mosaics from large sets of images for which georeferencing information exists (location, attitude, and altitude per image), to visualize them, and to extract data. Georeferencing information can be provided by the raw navigation data (collected during the survey) or result from the optimization obtained from image matching. Mosaics based solely on navigation can be readily generated by any user but the optimization and global alignment of the mosaic requires a case-by-case approach for which no universally software is available. The Lucky Strike photomosaics (optimized and navigated-only) are publicly available through the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS, http://www.marine-geo.org). The mosaic-generating and viewing software is available through the Computer Vision and Robotics Group Web page at the University of Girona (http://eia.udg.es/∼rafa/mosaicviewer.html).This work has been supported by the EU Marie Curie RTNs MOMARNet (OD, RG, JE, LN, JF, NG) and FREESUBNet (RG, NG, XC), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant CTM2007–64751; RG, JE), CNRS and ANR (grant ANR NT05–3_42212, JE), ICREA (LN), and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (JE, RG). JF has been funded by MICINN under FPI grant BES-2006-12733 and NG has been supported by MICINN under the ‘‘Ramon y Cajal’’ program