Ground squirrel, a hibernating mammalian species, is more resistant to ischemic brain stress than rat. Gaining insight into the adaptive mechanisms of ground squirrels may help us design treatment strategies to reduce brain damage in patients suffering ischemic stroke. To understand the anti-stress mechanisms in ground squirrel neurons, we studied glutamate toxicity in primary cultured neurons ...

Infectious disease introduced by non-native species is increasingly cited as a facilitator of native population declines, but direct evidence may be lacking due to inadequate population and disease prevalence data surrounding an outbreak. Previous indirect evidence and theoretical models support squirrelpox virus (SQPV) as being potentially involved in the decline of red squirrels (Sciurus vulg...

Received: Revised: Accepted: July 17, 2010 September 30, 2010 October 8, 2010

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...

The goal of this study was to understand the basis for high androgen levels in squirrel monkeys (Saimiri spp.). Mass spectrometry was used to analyze serum testosterone, androstenedione, and dihydrotestosterone of male squirrel monkeys during the nonbreeding (n = 7) and breeding (n = 10) seasons. All hormone levels were elevated compared with those of humans, even during the nonbreeding season;...

Squirrel monkeys have high cortisol compared to Old World primates to compensate for glucocorticoid resistance. Glucocorticoid resistance in squirrel monkeys may result from mutations in the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) that render it less transcriptionally competent, or expression of the co-chaperone FKBP51 that reduces ligand binding. The goal of this study was to reconcile the contribution o...

To document naturally occurring aortic intimal changes with age in squirrel and Cebus monkeys, the aortic lipid class composition, histology, and fine structure were quantitatively compared in the two species at birth and in old age. The aortic intima plus inner media in the young squirrel monkey contained more lipid, particularly in the phospholipid and cholesterol ester fractions than in youn...