Transmembrane helix seven residues of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) couple agonist binding to a conserved receptor activation mechanism. Amino-terminal residues of the GnRH peptide determine agonist activity. We investigated GnRH interactions with the His(7.36(305)) residue of the GnRH receptor, using functional and computational analysis of modified GnRH receptors and peptides. Non-polar...

INTRODUCTION Anti-carbamylated protein (anti-CarP) antibodies have been described in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and arthralgia patients at risk of developing RA. To what extent these autoantibodies are specific for RA is unknown. Therefore, we investigated the diagnostic performance of the presence of anti-CarP antibodies for RA in a setting of early arthritis. METHODS Anti-CarP antibodies wer...

Two species of common edible fish, common carp (Cyprinus carpio) and silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), were exposed to a Microcystis spp.-dominated natural cyanobacterial water bloom for two months (concentrations of cyanobacterial toxin microcystin, 182-539 microg/g biomass dry wt). Toxins accumulated up to 1.4 to 29 ng/g fresh weight and 3.3 to 19 ng/g in the muscle of silver carp an...

The effect of adding protein xanthophyll from lucerne (PX) on growth parameters and the redox profile of carp muscle Cyprinus carpio (L.) was studied. During a 10-week experiment, carp were kept in two types of tanks: Control, where fish were fed a commercial fish feed, and in experimental tanks (PX+), where the fish were fed the same fish feed with a 5% addition protein xanthophyll from lucern...

Many experimental studies have documented the impact of microcystins (MC) on fish based on either intraperitoneal injection, or oral gavaging via the diet, but few experiments were conducted by MC exposure through natural food uptake in lakes. In this study, the phytoplanktivorous silver carp were stocked in a large pen set in Meiliang Bay of Taihu Lake where toxic Microcystis blooms occurred i...

Management of silver carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix has become a growing concern for multiple state and federal entities. Commercial fishing may have the greatest potential to control silver carp. However, for a management action to be successful, the level of exploitation required to reduce silver carp populations must be quantified. Therefore, silver carp were collected from Midwestern U.S....

The purpose of the study was to determine the microbiological status of 161 samples cooled and frozen fish products collected from retail markets in the Republic of Bulgaria. The highest total viable counts (TVCs) in cooled fish products were established for silver carp (7.30 log cfu/g), Black sea roach (7.28 log cfu/g) and trout (7.11 log cfu/g), followed by common carp (6.81 log cfu/g), vacuu...

In perifused immortalized GnRH neurons (GT1-7), simultaneous measurements of GnRH and cAMP revealed that the secretory profiles for both GnRH and cAMP are pulsatile. An analysis of GnRH and cAMP pulses in 16 independent experiments revealed that 25% of pulses coincide. Inversion of the peak and nadir levels was found in 33% and random relationship between GnRH and cAMP found in 42% of analyzed ...

A gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)-binding inhibitor (GnRH-BI) was purified from bovine ovaries and identified as histone H2A. In the present studies, the biological effects of partially purified and purified ovarian GnRH-BI, as well as calf thymus histone H2A, were examined in rat ovarian cells. Since GnRH has direct antigonadotropic actions on these cells, the effects on luteinizing horm...

This paper proposes a new transformation of arc routing problems into equivalents node routing problems, with emphasis on the transformation of Capacitated Arc Routing Problems (CARP) into Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRP). For this last case, an analogue transformation has already been proposed in Pearn et al. [21], where each required CARP arc was mapped onto a triplet of CVRP nodes...