The corn- and rice-strains of Spodoptera frugiperda exhibit several genetic and behavioral differences and appear to be undergoing ecological speciation in sympatry. Previous studies reported conflicting results when investigating male attraction to pheromone lures in different regions, but this could have been due to inter-strain and/or geographic differences. Therefore, we investigated whethe...

background: heat stress is a common and usual problem in industries. several indices, including wet bulb globe temperature (wbgt), are used to evaluate heat stress. however, wbgt index has limitations such as high cost and response time. it is not thus suitable as a screening tool. heat strain scoring index (hssi) is also an observational-judgmental technique that has been developed for primary...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen that may cause severe infections in humans and other vertebrates. In addition, a human clinical isolate of P. aeruginosa, strain PA14, also causes disease in a variety of nonvertebrate hosts, including plants, Caenorhabditis elegans, and the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella. This has led to the development of a multihost pathogenesis syst...

Differences in breathing pattern between awake C57BL/6J (B6) and A/J mice are such that A/J mice breathe slower, deeper, and with greater variability than B6. We theorized that urethane anesthesia, by affecting cortical and subcortical function, would test the hypothesis that strain differences require a fully functional neuroaxis. We anesthetized B6 and A/J mice with urethane, placed them in a...

The mitotic chromosomes of several inbred strains of mice and a series of F(1) hybrids have been analyzed by quinacrine staining and further characterized by the centromeric heterochromatin banding (C-banding). Inbred strains had the same amount of C-banding material on homologous chromosomes but showed variation in the amount on different chromosomes. F(1) hybrids showed characteristics of eac...

A selection of 43 Candida albicans isolates, chosen to represent the four major strain clades of the species and also intraclade diversity, was screened for their virulence in the murine intravenous challenge model of C. albicans infection, for a range of properties measurable in vitro that might relate to virulence, and for the numbers of midrepeat sequences in genes of the ALS and HYR familie...

Induction of brain cytokines during times of stress has potent effects on altering behavior, mood, and cognitive functioning. Currently, it is unknown why exposure to some stressors such as tailshock and footshock elevate brain cytokines, while exposure to swim, predator odor, and restraint stress do not. Recent data indicate that brain noradrenergic signaling mediates brain cytokine production...

Recently, we described a simple procedure, Drinking in the Dark (DID), in which C57BL/6J mice self-administer ethanol to a blood ethanol concentration (BEC) above 1 mg/ml. The test consists of replacing the water with 20% ethanol in the home cage for 4 h early during the dark phase of the light/dark cycle. Three experiments were conducted to explore this high ethanol drinking model further. In ...

We performed an initial screen of 11 rat strains by use of a standard balloon injury to the left iliac artery to observe whether genetically determined differences existed in the development of neointimal hyperplasia. Neointimal hyperplasia was assayed 8 weeks after the vascular injury on coded microscopic sections. Statistically significant differences in the percentages of the vascular wall c...