BACKGROUND Peak internal knee abduction moment is a common surrogate variable associated with medial compartment knee loading. Stair descent has been shown to yield a greater peak knee abduction moment compared to level-walking. Changes in step width (SW) may lead to changes in frontal plane lower extremity limb alignment in the frontal plane and alter peak knee abduction moment. The purpose of...

The indolizidine alkaloid swainsonine (SU ) is an inhibitor of lysosomal a-mannosidase reported to have antimetastatic activity in animal models. The cells grown in its presence develop truncated (hybrid) surface oligosaccharides that may alter their functional properties dependent on interactions of various ligands with membrane receptors. In the present study we observe that SW enhances stimu...

Previous studies in eel (Anguilla anguilla) gill have shown that the expression of the aquaporin 3 (AQP3) water and small solute channel is dramatically decreased (mRNA abundance decreased by up to 97%) when these euryhaline fish are acclimated from freshwater (FW) to seawater (SW). However, AQP3 mRNA expression levels in the intestine following SW-acclimation do not change. The SW-acclimating ...

The pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells (ESCs), are capable of self-renewal and differentiation into any cell type, thus making them the focus of many clinical application studies. However, the efficiency of ESCs differentiated into neurons needs to improve. In this study, we tried to increase efficiently to a neural fate in the presence of various transitional Chinese medici...

Sleep has been described in animals ranging from worms to humans. Yet the electrophysiological characteristics of brain sleep, such as slow-wave (SW) and rapid eye movement (REM) activities, are thought to be restricted to mammals and birds. Recording from the brain of a lizard, the Australian dragon Pogona vitticeps, we identified SW and REM sleep patterns, thus pushing back the probable evolu...

Our interest on engineering non-ribosomal synthetase responsible for SW-163 biosynthesis prompted us to determine the relative and absolute configuration of antitumor cyclic depsipeptide SW-163s. We first isolated and identified SW-163 homologs D, F and G as known compounds UK-63598, UK-65662 and UK-63052, respectively. Both enantiomers of the unusual constitutive amino acid, N-methylnorcoromic...

The Semantic Web (SW) service is a web application using Semantic Web techniques which usually involve cooperation between several intelligent agents. The design of SW systems requires precise modelling techniques to capture ontology domain properties and application functionalities. We believe that Z as a specification technique can contribute to the Semantic Web-based system development in ma...

We consider the propagation of a shock wave (SW) in the damped Toda lattice. The SW is a moving boundary between two semi-infinite lattice domains with different densities. A steadily moving SW may exist if the damping in the lattice is represented by an “inner” friction, which is a discrete analog of the second viscosity in hydrodynamics. The problem can be considered analytically in the conti...

This review addresses an often overlooked aspect of elasmobranch osmoregulation, i.e., control of body fluid volume. More specifically the review addresses the impact of changes in blood volume in elasmobranchs exposed to different environmental salinities. Measurement of blood volume in the European lesser-spotted dogfish, Scyliorhinus canicula, following acute and chronic exposure to 80% and ...

The SW Sex stars are a class of cataclysmic variables, originally identified because they shared a number of enigmatic properties – most notably, single-peaked emission lines instead of the double-peaked lines one would expect from their high-inclination accretion discs. We present high-time-resolution spectrophotometry of the eclipsing nova-like variables SW Sex and DW UMa, two of the founding...