BACKGROUND The TH-MYCN transgenic mouse is the most widely used murine model of human neuroblastoma, in which a human MYCN oncogene is targeted to neuroectodermal cells of developing mice under the influence of the rat tyrosine hydroxylase promoter. So far, homozygous transgenic mice have been identified by either Southern blot or quantitative real-time PCR. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To establish a ...

OBJECTIVE In this study are evaluated the usefulness of the buffy coat smear and panbacterial polymerase chain reaction (PCR) as diagnostic tests in the early detection of neonatal sepsis. MATERIAL AND METHODS It was studied 49 patients aged up to 28 days who were hospitalized in the Intensive Care Unit (ICUs) of the Neonatology, with a clinical diagnosis of neonatal sepsis and 49 umbilical c...

All mature B-cell leukaemias and lymphomas have a clonal Ig gene recombination, and half of them have a reciprocal chromosomal translocation involving the 14q32 locus. The 14q32 translocation partners are variable, such as BCL-2, BCL-1 and BCL-6, thus accounting for the difficulty in molecular detection by the current genomic polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. To identify B-cell clones eff...

BACKGROUND Studies of the epigenome have attracted some interest in nephrology. However, to date, our knowledge about the alterations in histone modification in minimal change nephrotic syndrome (MCNS) is unknown. This study aimed to investigate the variations in histone H3 lysine 4 trimethylation (H3K4me3) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of patients with MCNS. METHODS H3K4me3 variation...

Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) and enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus polymerase chain reaction (ERIC-PCR) genomic fingerprinting assays were compared for their ability to differentiate Escherichia coli isolates obtained from various host sources, and with respect to their pathogenicity. One hundred and ten verotoxigenic, enterotoxigenic and non-pathogenic E. coli is...

Background Accurate measurements of skeletal kinematics of the foot would increase our understanding on the interaction between foot and footwear. Previously foot kinematics was measured using reflective markers but the method had inherent limitation of skin marker-based methods. Recently fluoroscopic imaging-based methods has been developed and widely used to measure knee kinematics [1,2]. We ...

We examine, in a general setting, a notion of inverse semigroup of left quotients, which we call left I-quotients. This concept has appeared, and has been used, as far back as Clifford’s seminal work describing bisimple inverse monoids in terms of their right unit subsemigroups. As a consequence of our approach, we find a straightforward way of extending Clifford’s work to bisimple inverse semi...

This paper presents an algorithm for detecting and computing the cusp points in the joint space of 3-RPR planar parallel manipulators. In manipulator kinematics, cusp points are special points, which appear on the singular curves of the manipulators. The nonsingular change of assembly mode of 3-RPR parallel manipulators was shown to be associated with the existence of cusp points. At each of th...

In this paper we consider a complete dynamic model for the \Sphericle", a spherical vehicle that has been designed and realized in our laboratory. The sphericle is able to roll on the oor of the laboratory and reach arbitrary positions and orientations, through the use of only two motors placed within the rolling sphere. In this paper, we report on the derivation of the kinematic model of the S...