The Persian sturgeon (Acipenser persicus) is considered as an endemic sturgeon of the south part of the Caspian Sea and provides the highest Iranian caviar production. Due to overfishing, degradation of the rivers conditions of the natural reproductive habitats, the fish stocks is decreasing. The immature breeders do not response to hormonal therapy at the sturgeon hatcheries as most ha...

Signal transduction pathways involved in the hypertrophic effect of neuropeptide Y (NPY) were investigated in adult cardiomyocytes. Reduction of transforming growth factor-β activity in serum-supplemented media abolished the induction of hypertrophic responsiveness to NPY. In responsive cells, NPY (100 nM) increased protein synthesis, determined as incorporation of [14C]phenylalanine, by 35 ± 1...

In this paper, we continue the investigation proposed in [15] about the approximability of Pk partition problems, but focusing here on their complexity. More precisely, we prove that the problem consisting of deciding if a graph of nk vertices has n vertex disjoint simple paths {P1, · · · , Pn} such that each path Pi has k vertices is NP-complete, even in bipartite graphs of maximum degree 3. N...

Received Apr 5, 2017 Revised May 20, 2017 Accepted Jun 15, 2017 In this study, an optimal meta-heuristic optimization algorithm for load frequency control (LFC) is utilized in two-area power systems. This metaheuristic algorithm is called harmony search (HS), it is used to tune PI controller parameters (Kp, Ki) automatically. The developed controller (HSPI) with LFC loop is very important to mi...

Thresholds for detection of foveal pi 4-detected 522 nm, 1 deg, 200 msec test flashes rise by up to 0.4 log units just after a pi 4-equated "exchange" field has been substituted for the adaptation field, and take 60-90 sec to recover. This effect is not changed by an intense blue auxiliary field, and varies with the difference between adaptation and exchange field wavelengths as if only inputs ...

It is shown that on every closed oriented Riemannian 4-manifold (M, g) with positive scalar curvature, $$\begin{aligned} \int _M|W^+_g|^2d\mu _{g}\ge 2\pi ^2(2\chi (M)+3\tau (M))-\frac{8\pi ^2}{|\pi _1(M)|}, \end{aligned}$$ ? M | W g + 2 d ? ? ? ( ? ) 3 ? - 8 1 , where $$W^+_g$$ $$\chi (M)$$ and $$\tau respectively, denote the self-dual Weyl tensor of g, Euler characteristic signature M. This g...

We welcome the cross-sectional, observational, case-finding study on alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD) in 1002 individuals with COPD conducted by Sorroche et al. in Buenos Aires. This is the first study of its kind in Argentina.1 The authors set out to identify all genotypes associated with severe AATD (namely, Pi*ZZ and Pi*SZ) using an effective screening technique based on the quantificat...

The prognostic value of proliferation index (PI) and apoptotic index (AI), caspase-8, -9 and -10 expression have been investigated in primary Ewing's sarcoma family of tumours (ESFT). Proliferating cells, detected by immunohistochemistry for Ki-67, were identified in 91% (91/100) of tumours with a median PI of 14 (range 0-87). Apoptotic cells, identified using the TUNEL assay, were detected in ...