While tremendous advances have improved the understanding of inflammatory bowel disease, with regard to environmental risk factors as well as the biochemical nature of the inflammatory process, a determination of primary etiology remains elusive. Numerous theories have been proposed in the past century concerning the cause of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis with implications for specific...

A compared study of the morphology of the alimentary tract and liver of seven selected species corresponding to the main clades of the Characidae family is presented herein. Three new set of characters corresponding to 1) alimentary tract gross anatomy, 2) alimentary tract histology and 3) liver gross anatomy are evaluated as potential sources of data for future phylogenetic studies of the Char...

Alimentary/Tract/Motility/ 1 SMOOTH MUSCLE Smooth muscle lines the walls of hollow organs (eg. intestine, uterus), the circulatory system (arteries and veins), and ducts of secretory glands. The primary role of smooth muscle is to regulate the diameter of the organ lumen which it surrounds. Although "smooth muscle" is used to categorize muscle components of these various tissues, there is a lar...

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are innate immune receptors expressed in all parts of the alimentary tract. However, analyses comparing expression in different segments and data on germ-free animals are lacking. Alimentary tract cancers show increased TLR expression. According to the field effect concept, carcinogenetic factors induce subtle cancer predisposing alterations in the whole organ. We stu...

The distribution of argininosuccinate synthetase (ASS)-like immunoreactive neurons in the myenteric plexus of the rat alimentary tract were immunocytochemically studied using whole-mount tissues. The present study revealed ASS-like immunoreactive meshworks of ganglia and interconnecting nerve strands in the myenteric plexus of almost all parts of the alimentary tract. ASS-like immunoreactive ne...