The current study aimed to determine the incidence of various benign mimickers of prostatic adenocarcinoma most commonly encountered in a busy consultation practice. All prostate needle biopsies from the consult service of one of the authors were prospectively evaluated over a 7-month period. Only cases with foci where the contributor questioned malignancy and which upon expert review the entir...

In vitro studies of biological macromolecules are usually performed in dilute, buffered solutions containing one or just a few different biological macromolecules. Under these conditions, the interactions among molecules are diffusion limited. On the contrary, in living systems, macromolecules of a given type are surrounded by many others, at very high total concentrations. In the last few year...

Macromolecular crowding plays a significant role in the solubility and stability of biomacromolecules. In this work, the thermo-sensitive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) has been employed as a model system to study the specific ion effects on the solubility of macromolecules in crowded environments of dextran and polyethylene glycol (PEG). Our study demonstrates that crowding agents can in...

Recent experiments provided controversial observations that either parallel or non-parallel G-quadruplex exists in molecularly crowded buffers that mimic cellular environment. Here, we used laser tweezers to mechanically unfold structures in a human telomeric DNA fragment, 5'-(TTAGGG)4TTA, along three different trajectories. After the end-to-end distance of each unfolding geometry was measured,...

Present study investigated the effect of red wine polyphenolic compounds (Provinols) on blood pressure (BP), nitric oxide synthase (NOS) activity and vascular function in Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats exposed to chronic social stress produced by crowding. Adult male rats were divided into four groups: control (480 cm(2)/rat), Provinols-treated (20 mg/kg/day, 480 cm(2)/rat), crowded (200 cm(2)/rat) an...

The role of prostaglandins and nitric oxide (NO), generated after peripheral lipopolysaccharide (LPS) administration, in the adaptation of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis under stressful circumstances remains to be elucidated. The aim of the present study was to assess the effect of chronic repetitive restraint or social crowding stress on the involvement of nitric oxide and prostagla...

Visual adaptation has been successfully used for studying the neural activity of different cortical areas in response to visual stimuli when observers do not have explicit conscious access to those stimuli. We compared the orientation selective adaptation to apparent motion and its effect on the perception of stimuli with bistable apparent motion in crowded and non-crowded conditions. In the cr...

Using single-molecule fluorescence microscopy and particle-tracking techniques, we elucidate the role DNA topology plays in the diffusion and conformational dynamics of crowded DNA molecules. We focus on large (115 kbp), double-stranded ring and linear DNA crowded by varying concentrations (040%) of dextran (10, 500 kDa) that mimic cellular conditions. By tracking the center-of-mass and measuri...

The effects of five levels of population density on various organs, the neuroendocrine system, skin function, skin blood perfusion, and blood parameters were studied in the hairless mouse. Skin barrier recovery was evaluated by measuring transepidermal water loss after tape stripping. Blood perfusion was measured by means of a laser Doppler imaging technique. The effect of a parasympathetic ner...

Multiple people detection and tracking is a challenging task in real-world crowded scenes. In this paper, we have presented an online multiple people tracking-by-detection approach with a single camera. We have detected objects with deformable part models and a visual background extractor. In the tracking phase we have used a combination of support vector machine (SVM) person-specific classifie...