The Drosophila myoblast city (mbc) locus was previously identified on the basis of a defect in myoblast fusion (Rushton et al., 1995. Development [Camb.]. 121:1979-1988). We describe herein the isolation and characterization of the mbc gene. The mbc transcript and its encoded protein are expressed in a broad range of tissues, including somatic myoblasts, cardial cells, and visceral mesoderm. It...

Most cortical visual neurons do not respond linearly with contrast. Generally, they show saturated responses to stimuli of high contrast, a feature often characterized by a divisive normalization function. This nonlinearity is generally thought to be useful in focusing the dynamic response range of the neuron on a particular region of contrast space, optimizing contrast gain. Some neurons not o...

Volumetric mass transfer coefficient (kLa) is an important parameter in bioreactors handling viscous fermentations such as xanthan gum production, as it affects the reactor performance and productivity. Published literatures showed that adding an organic phase such as hydrocarbons or vegetable oil could increase the kLa. The present study opted for palm oil as the organic phase as it is plentif...

Lipase-catalyzed production of palm esters by alcoholysis of palm oil with oleyl alcohol in n-hexane was performed in 2L stirred-tank reactor (STR). Investigation on the performance of reactor operation was carried out in batch mode STR with single impeller mounted on the centrally located shaft. Rushton turbine (RT) impellers provide the highest reaction yield (95.8%) at lower agitation speed ...

Two-Color Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) Technique enables the measurement of the progress in mixing on macroand microscale simultaneously. This is done by injecting a mixture of an inert and a reacting fluorescent dye into the vessel. The inert dye serves as a tracer for the macromixing but does not predicate the mixing quality on the nano scale. Since the chemical reaction requires mixing o...

Power input is an important engineering and scale-up/down criterion in stirred bioreactors. However, reliably measuring power input in laboratory-scale systems is still challenging. Even though torque measurements have proven to be suitable in pilot scale systems, sensor accuracy, resolution, and errors from relatively high levels of friction inside bearings can become limiting factors at small...

Rod ERGs were measured at three times of day over an extensive range of retinal illuminances in six light-entrained patients with autosomal recessive or isolate forms of retinitis pigmentosa and at five times of day in six light-entrained normal volunteers. B-wave amplitude versus retinal illuminance functions from each time of day were described by determining the parameters of the best-fit Na...

This review celebrates the adaptation studies published in Vision Research during the past half a century, and it is thus a complement to the anniversary issues which are focusing on more recent work (Vision Research, 51(7 and 8), 2011). Throughout the text, the discussion often starts out from a work presented in Vision Research, but the discussion is not restricted by the journals used for pu...

We have recently suggested that the brain uses its sensitivity to optic flow in order to parse retinal motion into components arising due to self and object movement (e.g. Rushton, S. K., & Warren, P. A. (2005). Moving observers, 3D relative motion and the detection of object movement. Current Biology, 15, R542-R543). Here, we explore whether stereo disparity is necessary for flow parsing or wh...