Connexins have been proposed as a target for therapeutic treatment of a variety of conditions. The main approaches have been by antisense or small peptides specific against connexins. Some of these peptides enhance communication while others interfere with connexin binding partners or bind to the intracellular and extracellular loops of connexins. Here, we explored the mechanism of action of a ...

Methods and Results-—Thirteen healthy young (23 2 years) and 13 older men (61 5 years) were instructed to continuously wear a compression sleeve around the right forearm to chronically (2 weeks) elevate brachial artery retrograde SR in 1 arm. We assessed SR, diameter, and flow-mediated dilation in both the sleeve and contralateral control arms at baseline and after 30 minutes and 2 weeks of con...

The soil lipid fraction can play an important role in the sorption of organic compounds. In this study, the impact of the lipid fraction of freshwaterand wastewater-irrigated soils on the sorption of nonand relatively polar compounds was assessed. Lipid analyses revealed a clear difference between the two lipid fractions. The lipid extract from the wastewater-irrigated soil was consistent with ...

With several hundred genetic diseases and an advantageous genome structure, dogs are ideal for mapping genes that cause disease. Here we report the development of a genotyping array with B27,000 SNPs and show that genome-wide association mapping of mendelian traits in dog breeds can be achieved with only B20 dogs. Specifically, we map two traits with mendelian inheritance: the major white spott...

Changes in visual cortical responses that are induced by monocular visual deprivation are a widely studied example of competitive, experience-dependent neural plasticity. It has been thought that the deprived-eye pathway will fail to compete against the open-eye pathway for limited amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which acts on TrkB and is needed to sustain effective synaptic conne...

Maize leaves have distinct tissues that serve specific purposes. The blade tilts back to photosynthesize and the sheath wraps around the stem to provide structural support and protect young leaves. At the junction between blade and sheath are the ligule and auricles, both of which are absent in the recessive liguleless1 (lg1) mutant. Using an antibody against LG1, we reveal LG1 accumulation at ...

1RABEA HAQ, 1,2YIT Y LIM, 1,2ANTHONY J MAXWELL, 1EMMA HURLEY, 1URSULA BEETLES, 1SARA BUNDRED, 1MARY WILSON, 2SUSAN ASTLEY and 3FIONA J GILBERT Nightingale Centre and Genesis Prevention Centre, University Hospital South Manchester NHS Trust, Manchester, UK Centre for Imaging Sciences, Institute of Population Health, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Department of Radiology, University of ...

We present Masai, a read mapper representing the state-of-the-art in terms of speed and accuracy. Our tool is an order of magnitude faster than RazerS 3 and mrFAST, 2–4 times faster and more accurate than Bowtie 2 and BWA. The novelties of our read mapper are filtration with approximate seeds and a method for multiple backtracking. Approximate seeds, compared with exact seeds, increase filtrati...

Evidence indicates that sleep after learning is critical for the subsequent consolidation of human memory. Whether sleep before learning is equally essential for the initial formation of new memories, however, remains an open question. We report that a single night of sleep deprivation produces a significant deficit in hippocampal activity during episodic memory encoding, resulting in worse sub...

Fragmentation of metastable anions of all deoxynucleosides and nucleosides constituting DNA and RNA has been studied experimentally and by computer simulations. The ions were formed through deprotonation in matrix assisted laser desorption/ionisation (MALDI). Clear difference in fragmentation patterns was obtained for nucleosides containing purine vs. pyrimidine bases. To elucidate the role of ...