The Drosophila egg chamber, whose development is divided into 14 stages, is a well-established model for developmental biology. However, visual stage determination can be a tedious, subjective and time-consuming task prone to errors. Our study presents an objective, reliable and repeatable automated method for quantifying cell features and classifying egg chamber stages based on DAPI images. Th...

The Ziehl–Neelsen (ZN) stain, also known as the acidfast stain, has been reported to be helpful in detection and identification of Schistosoma eggs. In histological sections, Schistosoma mansoni egg shells appear as ZN positive and Schistosoma haematobium shells as ZN negative. The staining target of the responsible ZN component (carbolfuchsin) in the shell is unknown. Because carbolfuchsin is ...

The ability to count bacteria associated with reef-building corals in a rapid, reliable, and cost-effective manner has been hindered by the viscous and highly autofluorescent nature of the coral mucus layer (CML) in which they live. We present a new method that disperses bacterial cells by trypsinization prior to 4',6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI) staining and quantification by epifluorescenc...

Fig. I. Survivin inhibits Baxand Faa-inducedapoptosis in 293 cells. A, 293 cells were transfectedwith pcDNA3myc (control), pcDNA3myc-Survivin,pcDNA3myc-XIAP. pcDNA3-Bax, pcDNA3myc-Survivin+ pcDNA3-Bax, or pcDNA3myc-XIAP+ pcDNA3-Bax plasmidDNAs. One day later,the percentageof apoptoticcells (DAPI-staining)was determined (mean ±SE for three determinations). B, the expression of the transfected p...

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and rRNA slot blot hybridization with 16S rRNA-targeted oligonucleotide probes were used to investigate the phylogenetic composition of a marine Arctic sediment (Svalbard). FISH resulted in the detection of a large fraction of microbes living in the top 5 cm of the sediment. Up to 65.4% +/- 7.5% of total DAPI (4',6'-diamidino-2-phenylindole) cell counts...

Previous studies have shown that drugs which bind in the DNA minor groove reduce the curvature of bent DNA. In this article, we examined the effects of these drugs on the nucleosome assembly of DNA molecules that display different degrees of intrinsic curvature. DAPI (4,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole) inhibited the assembly of a histone octamer onto a 192-base pair circular DNA fragment from Caenor...