Dopexamine can attenuate the inflammatory response and protect against organ injury in the absence of significant effects on hemodynamics or regional microvascular flow

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

In vitro mass multiplication of pomegranate from cotyledonary nodal explants cv. Ganesh

For surface sterilization of explants, treatment involving HgCl2 (0.1 %) for 3 min gave better sterilization of cotyledonary nodal explants. The maximum percentage establishment of cotyledonary node explants was observed on Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium + 1.0 mg/l 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP) + 0.5 mg/l naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA). However, MS medium fortified with 1.0 mg/l BAP + 1.0 mg/l kinetin + 200 mg/l activated charcoal exhibited maximum multiplication rate for the first two subcultures. The maximum frequency of multiple shoots in cotyledonary explants (86.33 %) was observed on treatment MS + 1.0 mg/l BAP + 1.0 mg/l kinetin + 200 mg/l activated charcoal. In vitro rooting of regenerated shoot was found in half strength MS medium supplemented with 0.5 mg/l NAA + 200 mg/l activated charcoal, which recorded the maximum number of root/shoot (4.17) and root length (3.87 cm). In vitro grown plantlets having 5 to 6 cm length of shoot were transferred to vermicompost + soil (1:1v/v) media kept in net house, which showed better survival of plantlet (85.50%) within 11.75 days.Keywords: Establishment, multiplication, rooting, acclimatization, Punica granatumAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(20), pp. 2863-286

An information theoretic notion of software testability

CONTEXT: In software testing, Failed Error Propagation (FEP) is the situation in which a faulty program state occurs during the execution of the system under test (SUT) but this does not lead to incorrect output. It is known that FEP can adversely affect software testing and this has resulted in associated information theoretic measures. OBJECTIVE: To devise measures that can be used to assess the testability of the SUT. By testability, we mean how likely it is that a faulty program state, that occurs during testing, will lead to incorrect output. Previous work has considered a single program point rather than an entire program. METHOD: New, more fine-grained, measures were devised. Experiments were used to evaluate these and the previously defined measures (Squeeziness and Normalised Squeeziness). The experiments assessed how well these measures correlated with an estimate of the probability of FEP occurring during testing. Mutants were used to estimate this probability. RESULTS: A strong rank correlation was found between several of the measures and the probability of FEP. Importantly, this included the Normalised Squeeziness of the whole SUT, which is simpler to compute, or estimate, than most of the other measures considered. Additional experiments found that the measures were relatively insensitive to the choice of mutants and also test suite. CONCLUSION: There is scope to use information theoretic measures to estimate how prone an SUT is to FEP. As a result, there is potential to use such measures to prioritise testing or estimate how much testing an SUT might require

Effect of soil pH on sorption of salinomycin in clay and sandy soils

Salinomycin is polyether ionophore, commonly used in poultry industry for the prevention of coccidial infections and promotion of growth. A large amount of the administered antibiotic is excreted as parent compound, eventually reaching agricultural lands. This makes it imperative for researchers to understand the behavior of the compound in soil environment by conducting sorption-desorption studies. In this study, sorption of salinomycin was measured in four agricultural soils, a clay soil with low organic matter content (LOM), a clay soil with high organic matter content (HOM), a sandy soil with HOM, and a loamy sandy (LOM) soils, at three pH levels, namely 4, 7 and 9. Desorption studies was carried out using the batch equilibration technique. It was observed that more than 98% salinomycin was strongly sorbed by all soils, irrespective of the soil organic matter content or soil pH. The sorption of salinomycin to the sandy soil marginally increased as the pH decreased, while the sorption to the two clay soils marginally increased as the pH increased. Desorption of salinomycin with methanol over a 72 h period was < 0.2% of the amount added; however, it was > 70% with a phosphate buffer (pH 7). Since the phosphate buffer would mimic, to some extent, the quality of water flowing through field soils containing various salts, it was concluded that salinomycin could pose significant threats to both shallow ground water and surface water bodies.Key words: Salinomycin, sorption, pH, desorption, environmental pollution, phosphate buffer

Validation of a novel particle isolation procedure using particle doped tissue samples.

A novel particle isolation method for tissue samples was developed and tested using particle-doped peri-articular tissues from ovine cadavers. This enabled sensitivity of the isolation technique to be established by doping tissue samples of 0.25 g with very low particle volumes of 2.5 µm 3 per sample. Image analysis was used to verify that the method caused no changes to particle size or morphologies

Recovery rate data for silicon nitride nanoparticle isolation using sodium polytungstate density gradients

© 2018 The Authors The average recovery rate of silicon nitride nanoparticles isolated from serum using the method detailed in previous article “A novel method for isolation and recovery of ceramic nanoparticles and metal wear debris from serum lubricants at ultra-low wear rate” (Lal et al., 2016) [1] was tested gravimetrically by weighing particles doped into serum before and after the isolation process. An average recovery rate of approximately 89.6% (± 7.1 SD) was achieved

A degradatory fate for CCR4 suggests a primary role in Th2 inflammation.

CCR4 is the sole receptor for the chemokines CCL22 and CCL17. Clinical studies of asthmatic airways have shown levels of both ligands and CCR4+ Th2 cells to be elevated, suggestive of a role in disease. Consequently, CCR4 has aroused much interest as a potential therapeutic target and an understanding of how its cell surface expression is regulated is highly desirable. To this end, receptor expression, receptor endocytosis, and chemotaxis were assessed using transfectants expressing CCR4, CCR4+ human T cell lines, and human Th2 cells polarized in vitro. CCL17 and CCL22 drove rapid endocytosis of CCR4 in a dose-dependent manner. Replenishment at the cell surface was slow and sensitive to cycloheximide, suggestive of de novo synthesis of CCR4. Constitutive CCR4 endocytosis was also observed, with the internalized CCR4 found to be significantly degraded over a 6-h incubation. Truncation of the CCR4 C-terminus by 40 amino acids had no effect on cell surface expression, but resulted in significant impairment of ligand-induced endocytosis. Consequently, migration to both CCL17 and CCL22 was significantly enhanced. In contrast, truncation of CCR4 did not impair constitutive endocytosis or degradation, suggesting the use of alternative receptor motifs in these processes. We conclude that CCR4 cell surface levels are tightly regulated, with a degradative fate for endocytosed receptor. We postulate that this strict control is desirable, given that Th2 cells recruited by CCR4 can induce the further expression of CCR4 ligands in a positive feedback loop, thereby enhancing allergic inflammation