Developmental changes in testicular interstitium in the Najdi Ram Lambs

AbstractThis experiment was designed to study the relationship between growth rate and sexual development in Najdi ram lambs. Forty-five Najdi ram lambs were used in nine age groups (1–9th month age), keeping 5 lambs in each group. Results show that mean testis size and scrotal circumference increased at a constant rate, reaching a maximum value of 392.00±2.00g and 25.00±0.32cm respectively, at the age of 9months. A similar trend of growth was observed for the mean body weight, reaching a maximum value of 40.2±0.20kg at the age of 9months. There was a positive correlation between the increasing rates of body weight and size of the testis. There were significant differences (P<0.05) in testis size, scrotal circumference and body weight of lambs between all ages (1–9months). The histological section of testis showed that a small number of mature sperms appeared in the eighth month of age and their numbers increased in the ninth month. In conclusion, the current findings indicated that puberty in Najdi rams occurs between the 8th and 9th months of age

Graphene sensor arrays for rapid and accurate detection of pancreatic cancer exosomes in patients' blood plasma samples

Biosensors based on graphene field effect transistors (GFETs) have the potential to enable the development of point-of-care diagnostic tools for early stage disease detection. However, issues with reproducibility and manufacturing yields of graphene sensors, but also with Debye screening and unwanted detection of nonspecific species, have prevented the wider clinical use of graphene technology. Here, we demonstrate that our wafer-scalable GFETs array platform enables meaningful clinical results. As a case study of high clinical relevance, we demonstrate an accurate and robust portable GFET array biosensor platform for the detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) in patients’ plasma through specific exosomes (GPC-1 expression) within 45 min. In order to facilitate reproducible detection in blood plasma, we optimized the analytical performance of GFET biosensors via the application of an internal control channel and the development of an optimized test protocol. Based on samples from 18 PDAC patients and 8 healthy controls, the GFET biosensor arrays could accurately discriminate between the two groups while being able to detect early cancer stages including stages 1 and 2. Furthermore, we confirmed the higher expression of GPC-1 and found that the concentration in PDAC plasma was on average more than 1 order of magnitude higher than in healthy samples. We found that these characteristics of GPC-1 cancerous exosomes are responsible for an increase in the number of target exosomes on the surface of graphene, leading to an improved signal response of the GFET biosensors. This GFET biosensor platform holds great promise for the development of an accurate tool for the rapid diagnosis of pancreatic cancer