Selective breeding of mice for high voluntary wheel running has favoured characteristics that facilitate sustained, aerobically supported activity, including a "mini-muscle" phenotype with markedly reduced hind limb muscle mass, increased mass-specific activities of oxidative enzymes, decreased % myosin heavy chain IIb, and, in the medial gastrocnemius, reduced twitch speed, reduced mass-specif...

A long strand of DNA is wrapped around the core histone and forms a nucleosome. Although the nucleosome has long been assumed to be folded into 30-nm chromatin fibres, their structural details and how such fibres are organised into a nucleus or mitotic chromosome remain unclear. When we observed frozen hydrated (vitrified) human mitotic cells using cryo-electron microscopy, which enables direct...

Nowadays there are no doubts about the positive impact that fruits and vegetables have on human health. Plant fibres (i.e. non-digestible carbohydrates) are widely present in daily food, such as soups, dressings and sauces. On the other hand, agricultural (non-wood) by-products have a low economical value. However, those residues are frequently important sources of fibres so an important resear...

Reconstituted type I collagen fibres have received considerable interest as tendon implant materials due to their chemical and structural similarity to the native tissue. Fibres produced through a semi-continuous extrusion process were cross-linked with different concentrations of the zero-length cross-linker 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl) carbodiimide (EDC) in combination with N-hydroxysucc...

Structural parameters of raw and pre-treated viscose, modal and lyocell fibres were determined using X-ray diffraction, and compared with data obtained from iodine adsorption and tenacity measurements. A good correlation was found between iodine adsorption and structural changes. These structural parameters are correlated with surface thermodynamic parameters obtained by surface tension experim...

The axostyles of the flagellates Oxymonas, Saccinobaculus, and Notila are large ribbon-shaped structures which undulate actively in the cytoplasm. The form of their movements is described and illustrated. Axostyles consist of regular arrays of longitudinal fibres, the number of which varies between 100 and 5000 in different species. The fibres are about 240 A in diameter, apparently hollow, reg...

Burning mouth syndrome (BMS) is often an idiopathic chronic and intractable pain condition, affecting 1.5-5.5% of middle-aged and elderly women. We have studied the heat and capsaicin receptor TRPV1, and its regulator nerve growth factor (NGF), in BMS. Patients with BMS (n=10) and controls (n=10) were assessed for baseline and post-topical capsaicin pain scores, and their tongue biopsies immuno...

Anisotropic nanoparticles prepared from block copolymers are of growing importance as building blocks for the creation of synthetic hierarchical materials. However, the assembly of these structural units is generally limited to the use of amphiphilic interactions. Here we report a simple, reversible coordination-driven hierarchical self-assembly strategy for the preparation of micron-scale fibr...

The mammalian genome is organized into silenced and active domains, which are constituted by chromatin fibres. The fibres are comprised of nucleosome subunits in which nearly two turns of DNA wrap around a histone protein core. This first order of DNA structure is known as the 10 nm chromatin fibre. Almost since the discovery of the nucleosome our widely accepted paradigm of genome regulation h...