To the Editor, The Indian Medical Gazette StR,?I have read with considerable interest your leading article on epidemic dropsy in the October issue of the Gazette. I wish to draw your attention to one or two points in connection with your reference to our work on the subject. While offering criticism on the deductions made by us from our experiments you make no mention of the fact that albumin w...

The advent of DNA Microarray technologies has revolutionized the experimental studies of gene expressions. In the post-genomics era, clustering analysis has become a valuable tool for in-silico analysis of gene expression profiles. Although a number of clustering methods have been proposed, they are confronted with difficulties in meeting the requirements of high quality, large memory, performa...

Meiotic recombination is required for the orderly segregation of chromosomes during meiosis and for providing genetic diversity among offspring. Among mammals, as well as yeast and higher plants, recombination preferentially occurs at highly delimited chromosomal sites 1-2 kb long known as hotspots. Although considerable progress has been made in understanding the roles various proteins play in...

We consider the broadcasting problem for one-dimensional grid graphs with a given neighborhood template. There are two different models that have been considered-shouting (a node informs all of its neighbors in one step) and whispering (a node informs a single neighbor in one step). Let a(t) (respectively a(t)) denote the maximum number of nodes that can be reached in t steps by shouting (respe...

Genomic imprinting is the epigenetic marking of gene subsets resulting in monoallelic or predominant expression of one of the two parental alleles according to their parental origin. We describe the systematic experimental verification of a prioritized 16 candidate imprinted gene set predicted by sequence-based bioinformatic analyses. We used Quantification of Allele-Specific Expression by Pyro...

Suggestive QTL affecting raw firmness scores and average Instron force, tenderness, juiciness, and chewiness on cooked meat were mapped to pig chromosome 2 using a three-generation intercross between Berkshire and Yorkshire pigs. Based on its function and location, the calpastatin (CAST) gene was considered to be a good candidate for the observed effects. Several missense and silent mutations w...

The objective of this experiment was to determine age-related changes in collagen concentration, sarcomere length, calpain (μ- and m-) and calpastatin activities, postmortem proteolysis and Warner-Bratzler shear force (WBSF) in ovine longissimus thoracis et lumborum. Rambouillet lambs were slaughtered at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 months of age and samples of longissimus were collected at 0, 2 and 10 da...

The objectives of this study were to examine the effects of castration on the calpain proteinase system (mu-calpain, m-calpain, and calpastatin) activities and meat tenderness. Six each, MARC III bulls and steers were slaughtered at approximately 12 mo of age. Longissimus muscle samples were obtained for determining myofibril fragmentation index, Warner-Bratzler shear force, and sensory panel e...

The calpains (E.C. 3.4.22.17) and calpastatin constitute an ubiquitous, intracellular, Ca2+dependent protease/inhibitor system. This system has been implicated as a principal regulator of myofibrillar protein degradation in both ante-mortem and postmortem muscle. Although proteolytic activity of the calpains is primarily controlled through interaction of calpain and calpastatin, evidence for an...