Consensus guidelines for the use and interpretation of angiogenesis assays

The formation of new blood vessels, or angiogenesis, is a complex process that plays important roles in growth and development, tissue and organ regeneration, as well as numerous pathological conditions. Angiogenesis undergoes multiple discrete steps that can be individually evaluated and quantified by a large number of bioassays. These independent assessments hold advantages but also have limitations. This article describes in vivo, ex vivo, and in vitro bioassays that are available for the evaluation of angiogenesis and highlights critical aspects that are relevant for their execution and proper interpretation. As such, this collaborative work is the first edition of consensus guidelines on angiogenesis bioassays to serve for current and future reference

Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases

The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs) can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e. iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference

Events with large missing transverse energy at the CERN collider: III. Mass limits on supersymmetric particles

A sample of events with large missing transverse energy from 715 nb-1 of data from the UA1 experiment at the CERN proton-antiproton collider is used to search for evidence of supersymmetric particle production. Assuming that the photino is the lightest supersymmetric particle and that it is massless, we find a limit on the squark mass of mq>45 GeV/c2 at 90% CL, independently of the gluino mass. Similarly, we find a limit on the gluino mass of mg>53 GeV/c2 (at 90% CL) independently of the squark mass, provided that the gluino is not long-lived (i.e. provided that the squark is not too heavy, mq{less-than or approximate}1 TeV/c2). For equal squark and gluino masses we find a limit mq=mg>75 GeV/c2 at 90% CL. The effect of a non-zero photino mass on these limits is studied. © 1987

Measurement of B0 - anti-B0 mixing at the CERN S p anti-p S collider

We report on a new measurement of B0-BBAR0 mixing at the CERN SppBARS Collider. Mixing is measured in the non-isolated high mass dimuon sample using data from the 1988-1989 collider runs. The measured value of the mixing parameter, chi, is 0.145 +/- 0.035(stat.) +/- 0.014(syst.). The average of this measurement and that from our 1984-1985 data is chi = 0.148 +/- 0.029(stat.) +/- 0.017(syst.) assuming fully correlated systematic errors. Using the measurement of chi-d from ARGUS and CLEO, we obtain chi-s = 0.50 +/- 0.20, which gives a limit of chi-s > 0.17 (0.12) at 90% (95%) CL. Including the measurements of chi from the ALEPH and L3 experiments gives chi-s = 0.53 +/- 0.15, and a limit of chi-s > 0.27 (0.23) at 90% (95%) CL

Angular distributions for high-mass jet pairs and a limit on the energy scale of compositeness for quarks from the CERN pp? collider

Angular distributions of high-mass jet pairs (180<m2J<350 GeV) have been measured in the UA1 experiment at the CERN pp̄ Collider ( s=630GeV). We show that angular distributions are independent of the subprocess centre-of-mass (CM) energy over this range, and use the data to put constraints on the definition of the Q2 scale. The distribution for the very high mass jet pairs (240<m2J<300 GeV) has also been used to obtain a lower limit on the energy scale Λc of compositeness of quarks. We find Λc>415 GeV at 95% confidence level. © 1986