THE INFLUENCE OF BASEBALL PITCHING ON THE HARDNESS OF THE FLEXOR PRONATOR MUSCLES - USING ULTRASOUND REALTIME TISSUE ELASTGRAPHY

The purpose of this study was to examine changes of the individual hardness of the flexor - pronator muscle group after pitching. The twelve normal male volunteers who had played baseball participated in this study. One hundred pitches were performed, and the individual flexor pronator muscles hardness were analyzed using ultrasound real time tissue elastgraphy (RTE) both before and after 100 pitching. The hardness of the flexor pronator muscles were not significant different between before and after pitching. However, hardness of the most hardened muscle was significantly different between before and after pitching. Therefore RTE is useful method to manage of the pitching counts in pitchers who performed athletic rehabilitation after throwing injuries

Manuscript for Drug Metabolism and Disposition Title Developmental changes in hepatic OCT1 protein expression from neonates to children

Abstract Organic cation transporter 1 (OCT1) plays an important role in the disposition of clinicallyimportant drugs, and the capacity of OCT1 activity is presumed to be proportional to the protein expression level in organ tissues. Presently, knowledge of OCT1 protein expression in children is very limited, especially among neonates and small infants. Here, we report on the characterization of OCT1 protein expression in neonatal, infant and pediatric liver samples performed by Immunoblot analysis. OCT1 protein expression was detected in liver samples from neonates as early as postnatal day 1 -2. This youngest group showed significantly lower OCT1 expression normalized by GAPDH (0.03 ±0.02 arbitrary unit (AU), mean ± SD, N=7) compared to samples aged 3 -4 weeks (0.08 ±0.03 AU, N=5, **P< 0.01), 3 -6 months (0.23 ± 0.15 AU, N=7, **P< 0.01), 11 months -1 year (0.42 ± 0.32 AU, N=6, **P< 0.01), and 8 -12 years (1.00 ± 0.44 AU, N=7, **P< 0.01). These data demonstrate an age-dependent increase in OCT1 expression from birth up to 8-12 years of age, and the findings of this study contribute to the understanding of OCT1 functional capacity and their effect of the disposition of OCT1 substrates in neonates and small infants

Insight into single cell cloning in serum-free media

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells have been used as host cells for the manufacturing of therapeutic recombinant proteins over the past decade. It is thought that the development of high performance cell lines, which satisfy both productivity and regulatory expectations, is one of the key success drivers to establish good manufacturing processes. The cell line for the clinical and commercial productions should be derived from a single progenitor or clone, and so the single cell cloning is an essential step during the cell line development. Recently serum-free media have been widely applied for this step. But under such conditions, the cloning efficiency varies significantly among the clones. This might be because the serum-free conditions can be stressful for the CHO cells exposed to such an unexpected cloning process. In this study, we performed re-cloning from two pre-cloned cell lines to evaluate the impact of serum-free cloning on the resulting cell line characteristics; various parameters such as cell growth, productivity, fed-batch culture performance, product quality and cell stability were evaluated. As a result, most of the clones showed exactly the same performance before and after the cloning process, but some clones did not. The detail of these results will be presented and also the proper evaluation to be needed during cell line development, especially after the single cell isolation, will be discusse

Momentum reconstruction of charged particles using multiple Coulomb scatterings in a nuclear emulsion detector

This paper describes a new method for momentum reconstruction of charged particles using multiple Coulomb scatterings (MCS) in a nuclear emulsion detector with a layered structure of nuclear emulsion films and target materials. The method utilizes the scattering angles of particles precisely measured in the emulsion films. The method is based on the maximum likelihood to newly include information on the decrease of the energy as the particle travels through the detector. According to the MC simulations, this method can measure momentum with a resolution of 10% for muons of 500 MeV/c passing through the detector perpendicularly. The momentum resolution is evaluated to be 10-20%, depending on the momentum and emission angle of the particle. By accounting for the effect of the energy decrease, the momentum can be reconstructed correctly with less bias, particularly in the low-momentum region. We apply this method to measure the momentum of muon tracks detected in the NINJA experiment where the momentum is also measured independently by using the track range. The two measurements agree well within experimental uncertainties of a 2% difference, verifying the method experimentally. This method will extend the measurable phase space of muons and hadrons in the NINJA experiment.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figure

On the Relationship between Convex Bodies Related to Correlation Experiments with Dichotomic Observables

In this paper we explore further the connections between convex bodies related to quantum correlation experiments with dichotomic variables and related bodies studied in combinatorial optimization, especially cut polyhedra. Such a relationship was established in Avis, Imai, Ito and Sasaki (2005 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 38 10971-87) with respect to Bell inequalities. We show that several well known bodies related to cut polyhedra are equivalent to bodies such as those defined by Tsirelson (1993 Hadronic J. S. 8 329-45) to represent hidden deterministic behaviors, quantum behaviors, and no-signalling behaviors. Among other things, our results allow a unique representation of these bodies, give a necessary condition for vertices of the no-signalling polytope, and give a method for bounding the quantum violation of Bell inequalities by means of a body that contains the set of quantum behaviors. Optimization over this latter body may be performed efficiently by semidefinite programming. In the second part of the paper we apply these results to the study of classical correlation functions. We provide a complete list of tight inequalities for the two party case with (m,n) dichotomic observables when m=4,n=4 and when min{m,n}<=3, and give a new general family of correlation inequalities.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure

Structural difference due to intramolecular stacking interactions in dinuclear rhodium(III) complexes [{Rh(η5-C5Me5)(L)}2]n+containing pyrimidine-2-thionate and related ligands

Self-assembling reactions between [Rh(η5-C5Me5)(H2O)3]2+and pyrimidine-2-thionate(pymt) or related ligands[L; mpymt = 4-methyl-pyrimidine-2-thionate(1-), dmpymt = 4,6-dimethylpyrimidine-2-thionate(1-), apymt = 4-aminopyrimidine-2-thionate(1-), dapymt = 4,6-diaminopyrimidine-2-thionate(1-), or mpol = 2-sulfanyl-3-pyridinolate(2-)] were carried out and the products characterized by UV/vis, NMR spectroscopy, electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, and crystal structure analysis. All products are dinuclear rhodium(III) complexes of [{Rh(η5-C5Me5)(L)}2]n+: three crystal structures with mpymt, dmpymt and mpol were determined. The mpymt and dmpymt ligands co-ordinate through a 1κ2N,S:2κS mode and the two pyrimidine rings are located in cis position,whereas mpol adopts a five-membered chelating mode with 1κ2S,O:2κS and the two pyrimidine rings are located in trans position. Such structural difference can reasonably be explained by the　intramolecular stacking interaction between the two bridging ligands