New Bibliography on Animal Health Research in Papua New Guinea

This In Brief describes the development of a bibliographic database of research conducted and documented on animal health in Papua New Guinea. It provides a summary of the breadth of animal health research to date and offers some insights into the distribution of this research across species. The database has been created to assist in the design of a new research-for-development project on the provision of services to smallholder livestock owners in Papua New Guinea. The project is currently being developed with funding support from ACIAR.AusAI

The use of magnetic resonance imaging and proton spectroscopy to identify critical tissues in dogs with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy for future assessment of therapeutic intervention : a pilot study

Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy is a debilitating disease that affects skeletal and cardiac muscle of 1 in 5000 male births. In the last thirty years, the gene responsible for the encoding of Dystrophin has been identified, sequenced and the variations of mutations described. There remains a void in the successful treatment of the disease although corticosteroid use has proven useful in delaying progression. Novel therapies are produced in the categories of virus-mediated gene delivery and stem cells, but evaluating their efficacy is hindered by an inability to contemporaneously assess the changes in muscle. The purpose of this pilot study was to characterize the changes in skeletal and cardiac muscle in a clinically advanced population of dogs affected with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Using traditional sequences, delayed gadolinium enhancement, novel sequences and spectroscopy, changes in the investigated muscle were characterized. By establishing the differences between affected and unaffected dogs, the long-term goal of this body of work is to characterize these changes longitudinally and design a non-invasive method for tissue assessment as novel treatments are trialed.Includes bibliographical reference

Meromorphic functions that share a set with their derivatives

AbstractThere exists a set S with three elements such that if a meromorphic function f, having at most finitely many simple poles, shares the set S CM with its derivative f′, then f′≡f

Normal families and fixed points of iterates

Let F be a family of holomorphic functions and let K be a constant less than 4. Suppose that for all f in F the second iterate of f does not have fixed points for which the modulus of the multiplier is greater than K. We show that then F is normal. This is deduced from a result about the multipliers of iterated polynomials.Comment: 5 page

Detection of p73 antibodies in patients with various types of cancer: immunological characterization

p53 antibodies have been found in the sera of patients with various types of cancer. The presence of these antibodies is generally associated with p53 accumulation in the tumour that is believed to trigger this humoral response. The recent discovery of 2 new members of the p53 family, p73 and p63, led us to study the specificity of this immune response towards the 3 proteins. Serum samples from 148 patients with various types of cancer were tested for antibodies against p73 and p63 using immunoprecipitation. 72 patients were previously shown to have p53 antibodies whereas 76 were negative. The control group consisted of 50 blood donors. p73 were detected in 22/148 (14.9%) of the cancer patients (11/72 in the group with p53-antibodies and 11/76 in the negative group). Only two sera from the control (4%) were positive. p63 antibodies were detected in only 4/148 (2.7%) of the cancer patients. Epitope mappings were performed and demonstrate that p73 antibodies are directed toward the central region of the p73 protein whereas p53 antibodies react predominantly toward the amino- and the carboxy-terminus of p53. Our results indicate that there is a specific immune response toward the p73 protein in cancer patients, a finding supported by an increasing number of publications describing p73 accumulation in tumoral cells. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign http://www.bjcancer.co