BACKGROUND Nociceptin/orphanin FQ (N/OFQ) is the endogenous agonist of the orphan opioid receptor-like receptor (NOP receptor, previously termed ORL1), a novel member of the opioid receptor family. The aim of the present study, using in vitro newborn rat preparations, was to elucidate the roles N/OFQ and the NOP receptor play in medullary generation of respiratory rhythm. METHODS The brainste...

Muscle volumes of the gluteus medius, gluteus maximus, and tensor faciae latae assessed by a computed tomography (CT) scan were greater in men than women and not different between the left and the right side after total hip arthroplasty (THA). Body mass index, sex, age, and ambulatory status affected functional outcome after THA. However, the effects of psoas muscle mass and muscle quality on f...

This article offers a new test of the mobilisation thesis of Internet effects on individual political participation using data from an NOP survey of 1,972 UK adults during May 2002. The analysis differs from that of previous studies in that it significantly widens the understanding of the dependent variable—online participation—as well as introducing new Internet-specific variables as explanato...

In this paper, we propose an approach to analyze the resilience to failures of structured P2P systems. The approach is Markov-chain based, and can be applied to systems with relatively stable size and uniformly distributed nodes. We apply our method to several well-known structured P2P systems. We find that finger neighbors and special neighbors have different influences on the resilience featu...

It has been postulated that nodulation outer proteins (Nops) avoid effective nodulation of Sinorhizobium fredii USDA257 to nodulate with American soybeans. S. fredii HH103 naturally nodulates with both Asiatic (non-commercial) and American (commercial) soybeans. Inactivation of the S. fredii HH103 gene rhcJ, which belongs to the tts (type III secretion) cluster, abolished Nop secretion and decr...

Nociceptin/orphanin FQ (N/OFQ) modulates various biological functions, including nociception, via selective stimulation of the N/OFQ peptide receptor (NOP). Here we used the NOP selective antagonist UFP-101 to characterize the receptor involved in the spinal antinociceptive effects of N/OFQ evaluated in the mouse tail withdrawal assay and to investigate the mechanism underlying this action by a...

BACKGROUND Chondroitin sulfate (CS) is a ubiquitous component of the cell surface and extracellular matrix and its sugar backbone consists of repeating disaccharide units: D-glucuronic acid (GlcUA)β1-3N-acetyl-D-galactosamine (GalNAc). Although CS participates in diverse biological processes such as growth factor signaling and the nervous system's development, the mechanism underlying the funct...

Orphanin FQ/nociceptin (OFQ/N) is the endogenously occurring peptide ligand for the nociceptin opioid receptor (NOP) that produces anxiolytic-like effects in mice and rats. The present study assessed the anxiolytic-like activity of 8-[bis(2-methylphenyl)methyl]-3-phenyl-8-azabicyclo[3.2.1]octan-3-ol (SCH 221510), a novel potent piperidine NOP agonist (EC50 12 nM) that binds with high affinity (...

In this work we investigate the refinement propagation process in longest-edge based local refinement algorithms for unstructured meshes of triangles. The conformity neighborhood of a triangle, the set of additional triangles that is needed to be refined to ensure mesh conformity is introduced to define the propagation path. We prove that asymptotically the propagation path extends on average t...

In the first phase of the Dutch National Research Programme on Global Air Pollution and Climate Change (NOP-I) the emphasis was on global modelling, on a natural science-based approach and with more detailed studies focused on the Netherlands/Western Europe. In 1995 it was decided that in NOP-II (1996-2000) more attention should be devoted to the impact of climate change, to a social science pe...