Plants produce specialized metabolites for their defence. However, specialist herbivores adapt to these compounds and use them for their own benefit. Plants attacked predominantly by specialists may be under selection to reduce or eliminate production of co-opted chemicals: the defence de-escalation hypothesis. We studied the evolution of pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) in Apocynaceae, larval hos...

Lauded for getting specific health issues onto national and international agendas and for their potential to improve value for money and outcomes, public-private global health initiatives (GHIs) have come to dominate global health governance. Yet, they have also been criticised for their negative impact on country health systems. In response, disease-specific GHIs have, somewhat paradoxically, ...

An abnormal sharp anterior motion of the anterior mitral leaflet has been previously described as a diagnostic abnormality in hypertrophic subacute stenosis (HSS). The present prospective study explored the diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of this finding in 26 patients studied without knowledge of clinical diagnosis. When the abnormality observed was complete and persistent, a correct di...

We compared the effects of hypertonic saline 7.2%/6% hydroxyethyl starch (HSS-HES) and isotonic saline 0.9%/6% hydroxyethyl starch (ISS-HES) on ileal microcirculatory blood flow (MBF) at the initial phase of septic shock. Pigs were anesthetized and mechanically ventilated. Catheters were inserted into right atrium, pulmonary artery, carotid artery, and portal vein for hemodynamic measurements a...

In this paper we develop a fast direct solver for discretized linear systems using the multifrontal method together with low-rank approximations. For linear systems arising from certain partial differential equations such as elliptic equations we discover that during the Gaussian elimination of the matrices with proper ordering, the fill-in has a low-rank property: all off-diagonal blocks have ...

Recent genome-wide analyses of yeast and human chromatin revealed the widespread prevalence of DNase I hypersensitive sites (DNase I HSs) at gene regulatory regions with possible roles in eukaryotic gene regulation. The presence of DNase I HSs in plants has been described for only a few genes, and we analyzed the chromatin structure of an 80 kb genomic region containing 30 variably expressed ge...

The evolution of pathways within plant secondary metabolism has been studied by using the pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs) as a model system. PAs are constitutively produced by plants as a defense against herbivores. The occurrence of PAs is restricted to certain unrelated families within the angiosperms. Homospermidine synthase (HSS), the first specific enzyme in the biosynthesis of the necine ba...

Keratins 14 and 5 are the structural hallmarks of the basal keratinocytes of the epidermis and outer root sheath (ORS) of the hair follicle. Their genes are controlled in a tissue-specific manner and thus serve as useful tools to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms involved in keratinocyte-specific transcription. Previously we identified several keratinocyte-specific DNase I hypersensitive site...

We propose two new haplotype-sharing methods for identifying disease loci: the haplotype sharing statistic (HSS), which compares length of shared haplotypes between cases and controls, and the CROSS test, which tests whether a case and a control haplotype show less sharing than two random haplotypes. The significance of the HSS is determined using a variance estimate from the theory of U-statis...

In this issue of the Revista Brasileira de Terapia Intensiva, Rios et al.(1) demonstrate the effects of volume replacement with hypertonic saline solution (HSS) on hepatic cytokine production and expression of heat-shock proteins and apoptotic proteins in an animal model of acute pancreatitis. HSS down-regulated liver cytokine production and HSP60 expression in a more robust manner when compare...