While tracheid size of conifers is often a good proxy of water transport efficiency, correlations between conifer wood structure and transport safety remain poorly understood. It is hypothesized that at least some of the variation in bordered pit and tracheid structure is associated with both transport efficiency and embolism resistance. Stem and root samples from three boreal Pinaceae species ...

This article describes the characterization of a new Drosophila gene that we have called pitchoune (pit) (meaning small in Provence) because mutations in this gene produce larvae that cannot grow beyond the first instar larval stage although they can live as long as 7-10 days. All the tissues are equally affected and the perfectly shaped larvae are indistinguishable from first instar wild-type ...

In this article, we propose an approach to learn the characteristics of colonic mucosal surface structures, the so called pit patterns, commonly observed during high-magnification colonoscopy. Since the discrimination of the pit pattern types usually requires an experienced physician, an interesting question is whether we can automatically find a collection of images which most typically show a...

The incidence of functional asplenia in sickle-hemoglobin C (SC) disease has not been defined, and the use of prophylactic penicillin to prevent life-threatening septicemia in this disorder is controversial. The percentage of red blood cells with pits (pit count) is a reliable assay of splenic function in other disorders but has not been validated in hemoglobin SC disease. To address these issu...

Optic disc pit and optic nerve coloboma are examples of congenital optic disc abnormalities. Although optic nerve coloboma can be inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion, no conclusive link has been found in the case of optic disc pit as an autosomal dominant disease. We describe two cases: a daughter with an optic disc pit complicated by maculopathy and her mother with a congenitally abnorm...

This paper presents PIT, a library for the parallelization of irregular problems on distributed memory architectures. All the strategies underlying the definition of the library can be expressed in terms of operations on a PITree, a parallel version of the tree data structure oriented to irregular problems. We consider the application of PIT to two well known irregular problems: adaptive multig...

AIM Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is considered one of the most aggressive subtypes of breast cancer. Near infrared photoimmunotherapy (NIR-PIT) is a cancer treatment that employs an antibody-photosensitizer conjugate (APC) followed by exposure of NIR light for activating selective cytotoxicity on targeted cancer cells and may have application to TNBC. In order to minimize the dose of AP...

Background and study aims There have been few evaluations of the diagnostic ability of new narrow band light observation blue laser imaging (BLI). The present prospective study compared the diagnostic ability of BLI magnification and pit pattern analysis for colorectal polyps. Patients and methods We collected lesions prospectively, and the analysis of images was made by two endoscopists, retro...

When an initially neutral stimulus has been paired in Pavlovian fashion with an appetitive outcome such as food, noncontingent presentation of this conditioned stimulus (CS) can enhance ongoing instrumental responding, a phenomenon termed Pavlovian–instrumental transfer (PIT). In its simplest form, PIT is assessed by presenting a CS for food while the subject is responding in extinction on a si...

With the advent and wide spread use of computers a number of algorithms have been developed to determine the optimum ultimate pit limits in open pit mining. The main objective of these algorithms is to find groups of blocks that should be removed to yield the maximum overall mining profit under specified economic conditions and technological constraints. The most common methods are: Lerchs and ...