Activin is involved in pituitary hormone regulation and its pituitary actions can be nullified by local production of its binding protein follistatin. In our recent study with grass carp, local release of growth hormone (GH) was shown to induce activin expression at pituitary level, which in turn could exert an intrapituitary feedback to inhibit GH synthesis and secretion. To further examine th...

OBJECTIVES Anticarbamylated protein (anti-CarP) antibodies are a novel family of autoantibodies recently identified in patients with inflammatory arthritis. The aim of this study was to investigate their association with long-term outcomes of disability and disease activity over 20 years' follow-up in a cohort of patients with inflammatory polyarthritis (IP). METHODS Norfolk Arthritis Registe...

Numerous studies throughout North America allege deleterious associations among invasive Asian Carp and native fishes; however, no empirical evidence on a system-wide scale exists. We used Mississippi River Basin fish community data collected by the Long Term Resource Monitoring program and the Missouri Department of Conservation to evaluate possible interaction between Asian Carp and native fi...

This paper presents the first full-fledged branch-and-price (bap) algorithm for the capacitated arc-routing problem (CARP). Prior exact solution techniques either rely on cutting planes or the transformation of the CARP into a node-routing problem. The drawbacks are either models with inherent symmetry, dense underlying networks, or a formulation where edge flows in a potential solution do not ...

The aim of the study was to investigate the physical difference in biochemical characteristics of spermatological and seminal plasma and also ultrastructure of spermatozoa in six carp species, viz. catla, Catla catla, rohu, Labeo rohita, kalbasu, Labeo calbasu, mrigal, Cirrhinus mrigala, silver carp, Hypophthalmichthys molitrix and grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella. Semen yield from different...

Sublethal adverse effects may result from exposure of aquatic organisms to insecticides at environmentally relevant concentrations. Fingerlings of the common carp (Cyprinus carpio, Linnaeus, 1758), grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella, Valenciennes, 1844), and bighead carp (Aristichthys nobilis, Richardson, 1845) were exposed to diafuran, an insecticide widely used during rice cultivation in Sou...

In the nontumorous pituitary, GnRH stimulates the release and synthesis of LH and FSH by gonadotroph cells via the GnRH receptor (GnRH-R). Little is known, however, about expression of GnRH and GnRH-R messenger RNAs (mRNAs) in nontumorous pituitary tissue and in adenomas. To learn more about the distribution and regulatory roles of GnRH and its receptor, we investigated the expression of both G...

The crucian carp (Carassius carassius) seems unique among vertebrates in its ability to maintain cardiac performance during prolonged anoxia. We investigated whether this phenomenon arises in part from a myocardium tolerant to severe acidosis or because the anoxic crucian carp heart may not experience a severe extracellular acidosis due to the fish's ability to convert lactate to ethanol. Spont...

The inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP(3)) receptor (IP(3)R) is an intracellular IP(3)-gated Ca(2+) channel that is located on intracellular Ca(2+) stores and modulates Ca(2+) signalling. Using the yeast two-hybrid system, we screened a mouse brain cDNA library with bait constructs for mouse IP(3)R type 1 (IP(3)R1) to identify IP(3)R1-associated proteins. In this way, we found that carbonic anhyd...