Reconstruction of GABAergic Transmission and Behavior by Striatal Cell Grafts in Rats with Ischemic Infarcts in the Middle Cerebral Artery

Fetal striatal cell suspensions were grafted stereotaxically into the infarcted striatum of rats, and reconstruction of striatopallidal GABA transmission and behavior were investigated. Occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCA) for one hour induced ischemic infarcts mainly in the lateral striatum, as detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and histology. Ischemic rats had deficits in the performance of a passive avoidance task, both acquisition and retention, but no changes in general circadian actograms. In these animals pallidal GABA, detected by microdialysis, decreased to about half of control levels. There were suggestions of an improvement in passive avoidance performance in the grafted animals. Pallidal GABA concentrations recovered almost to control levels, and were increased by infusions of the GABA uptake blocker nipecotic acid. These data indicate that neural transplantation is a promising approach to improve the deficits in chemical transmission and behavior following ischemic infarcts in rat striatum

Recent Results from LHD Experiment with Emphasis on Relation to Theory from Experimentalist’s View

he Large Helical Device (LHD) has been extending an operational regime of net-current free plasmas towardsthe fusion relevant condition with taking advantage of a net current-free heliotron concept and employing a superconducting coil system. Heating capability has exceeded 10 MW and the central ion and electron temperatureshave reached 7 and 10 keV, respectively. The maximum value of β and pulse length have been extended to 3.2% and 150 s, respectively. Many encouraging physical findings have been obtained. Topics from recent experiments, which should be emphasized from the aspect of theoretical approaches, are reviewed. Those are (1) Prominent features in the inward shifted configuration, i.e., mitigation of an ideal interchange mode in the configuration with magnetic hill, and confinement improvement due to suppression of both anomalous and neoclassical transport, (2) Demonstration ofbifurcation of radial electric field and associated formation of an internal transport barrier, and (3) Dynamics of magnetic islands and clarification of the role of separatrix

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Nationwide surveillance of bacterial respiratory pathogens conducted by the surveillance committee of Japanese Society of Chemotherapy, the Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases, and the Japanese Society for Clinical Microbiology in 2010: General view of the pathogens\u27 antibacterial susceptibility

The nationwide surveillance on antimicrobial susceptibility of bacterial respiratory pathogens from patients in Japan, was conducted by Japanese Society of Chemotherapy, Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases and Japanese Society for Clinical Microbiology in 2010.The isolates were collected from clinical specimens obtained from well-diagnosed adult patients with respiratory tract infections during the period from January and April 2010 by three societies. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was conducted at the central reference laboratory according to the method recommended by Clinical and Laboratory Standard Institutes using maximum 45 antibacterial agents.Susceptibility testing was evaluable with 954 strains (206 Staphylococcus aureus, 189 Streptococcus pneumoniae, 4 Streptococcus pyogenes, 182 Haemophilus influenzae, 74 Moraxella catarrhalis, 139 Klebsiella pneumoniae and 160 Pseudomonas aeruginosa). Ratio of methicillin-resistant S.aureus was as high as 50.5%, and those of penicillin-intermediate and -resistant S.pneumoniae were 1.1% and 0.0%, respectively. Among H.influenzae, 17.6% of them were found to be β-lactamase-non-producing ampicillin (ABPC)-intermediately resistant, 33.5% to be β-lactamase-non-producing ABPC-resistant and 11.0% to be β-lactamase-producing ABPC-resistant strains. Extended spectrum β-lactamase-producing K.pneumoniae and multi-drug resistant P.aeruginosa with metallo β-lactamase were 2.9% and 0.6%, respectively.Continuous national surveillance of antimicrobial susceptibility of respiratory pathogens is crucial in order to monitor changing patterns of susceptibility and to be able to update treatment recommendations on a regular basis

On Non-eliminability of the Cut Rule and the Roles of Associativity and Distributivity in Non-commutative Substructural Logics

We introduce a sequent calculus FL', which has at most one formula on the right side of sequent, and which excludes three structural inference rules, i.e. contraction, weakening and exchange. Our formulations of the inference rules of FL' are based on the results and considerations carried out in our previous papers on how to formulate Gentzenstyle natural deduction for non-commutative substructural logics. Our present formulation FL' of sequent system for non-commutative substructural logic, which has no structural rules, has the same proof strength as the ordinary and standard sequent calculus FL (Full Lambek), which is often called Full Lambek calculus, i.e., the basic sequent calculus for all other substructural logics. For the standard FL (Full Lambek), we use Ono's formulation. Although our FL' and the standard formulation FL (Full Lambek) are equivalent, there is a subtle difference in the left rule of implication. In the standard formulation, two parameters Γ1 and Γ2 (resp.), each of which is just an finite sequence of arbitrary formulas, appear on the left and right side (resp.) of a formula appearing on the left side of the sequent on the upper left side the left rule ⊃ (which corresponds to ⊃' in FL'). On the other hand, there is no such parameter on the left side of the sequent on the upper left side in the left rule for ⊃' of our system FL. In our system FL', Γ1 is always empty, and only Γ2 is allowed to occur in the left rule for ⊃' (similar differences occur in the multiplicative conjunction, additive conjunction and additive disjunction). This subtle difference between our system FL' and the standard system FL (Full Lambek) matters deeply, for we are led to a construction of proof-figures in FL', which show how the associativity of multiplicative conjunction and the distributivity of multiplicative conjunction over additive disjunction are involved in the eliminations of the cut rule in those proofs. We clarify and specify how associativity and distributivity are related to the non-eliminability of an application of the cut rule in those proof-figures of FL'

Thin films of single-walled carbon nanotubes promote human osteoblastic cells (Saos-2) proliferation in low serum concentrations

One strategy used for the regeneration of bone is the development of cell culture substrates and scaffolds that can control osteoblast proliferation and differentiation. In recent investigations, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been utilized as scaffolds for osteoblastic cell cultures; however, there are only a few reports describing the proliferation of osteoblastic cells on thin CNT films; in particular, the effects of serum concentration on cell proliferation has not been studied. In the present study, we prepared culture dishes with homogeneous thin or thick films of non-modified CNTs and examined the effect of serum concentrations on human osteoblastic cells (Saos-2) proliferation in these culture dishes. We demonstrated that the ratio of cell proliferation was strongly affected by the concentration of serum. Interestingly, single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) thin films were found to be the most effective substrate for the proliferation of Saos-2 cells in low concentrations of serum. Thus, thin SWNT films may be used as an effective biomaterial for the culture of Saos-2 cells in low serum concentrations

Maintenance of hemiround colonies and undifferentiated state of mouse induced pluripotent stem cells on carbon nanotube-coated dishes

Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have attracted　worldwide interest. However, there　have been only a few studies investigating effective culture　substrates for feeder-free culturing for the　maintenance of iPS cells. In this study, we cultured mouse iPS cells under feeder-free conditions on carbon nanotube (CNT)-coated dishes and then evaluated the colony morphology and differentiation state of the cells on the dishes. After 5 d of cultivation in a medium containing 15% fetal bovine serum (FBS) and leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF), the colonies on thick films of multi-walled CNTs (MWCNTs) were observed to be hemiround; further, the cells expressed early undifferentiation markers. On the other hand, the colonies on a cell culture polystyrene dish and a collagen-coated polystyrene dish showed indistinct outline and spread well, and most spreading cells only weakly expressed early undifferentiation markers. These results indicate that the thick films of MWCNTs could maintain hemiround colonies and undifferentiated state of mouse iPS cells cultured under feeder-free conditions

The bactericidal effect of carbon nanotube/agar composites irradiated with near-infrared light on Streptococcus mutans

Dental caries are mainly associated with oral pathogens, and Streptococcus 2 mutans is a primary cariogenic organism. Many methods have been established to eliminate S. mutans from the oral cavity. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of carbon nanotube (CNT)/agar composites irradiated with near-infrared (NIR) light on S. mutans, as a potential photothermal antimicrobial nanotherapy. A colony-forming unit assay clearly showed that CNT/agar composites attain bactericidal activity after NIR light irradiation; this bactericidal activity is higher than that of graphite (GP)/agar and activated carbon (AC)/agar composites. Furthermore, it was observed that longer irradiation times immobilized S. mutans in the CNT/agar composite