The aim of the study was to find whether spatial memory impairment and disruption in locomotor activity were found in prenatally stressed rats (PSG) or prenatally methylazoxymethanol acetate-treated rats (MAMG). In addition to this, we examined basal plasma corticosterone level as well as brain-derived neurothropic factor (BDNF) in the PSG and MAMG rats. The effect of prenatal stress (stress pa...

Modification of the Serodia HBe haemagglutination kit produced by Fujirebio Incorporated, Tokyo, Japan, gave a rapid, economical, and easily performed test for hepatitis Be antigen (HBeAg). The use of this method to test serum samples for HBeAg is described. A modification of the kit to screen for anti-HBe is also described. The results obtained showed that this kit, when used by the method des...

BACKGROUND Active vitamin B12 absorption is followed by an increase in holotranscobalamin (holoTC) upon loading with a high physiological dose of the vitamin (the CobaSorb test). This study evaluates the use of a newly launched EIA kit for measurement of holoTC (active B12) in relation to the CobaSorb test. METHODS Intra-assay imprecision and linearity of the EIA kit was examined, employing s...

The sensitivity and specificity of a newly developed ligase chain reaction (LCR) test kit were examined by the use of highly purified elementary bodies (EBs) and in situ inclusions containing reticulate bodies only. The performance of the LCR kit was compared with a commercially available polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test kit, AMPLICOR Chlamydia trachomatis. The number of EBs and inclusions ...

The sensitivity and specificity of a newly developed ligase chain reaction (LCR) test kit were examined by the use of highly purified elementary bodies (EBs) and in situ inclusions containing reticulate bodies only. The performance of the LCR kit was compared with a commercially available polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test kit, AMPLICOR Chlamydia trachomatis. The number of EBs and inclusions ...

PURPOSE Circulating free DNA (cfDNA) in plasma is promising to be a surrogate for tumor tissue DNA. However, not all epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations in tumor tissue DNA has been detected in matched cfDNA, at least partly due to inefficient cfDNA extraction method. The purpose of this study was to establish an efficient plasma cfDNA extraction protocol. MATERIALS AND METHODS ...

The recent report on maternal insulin-like growth factor-I is very interesting. Yang et al. concluded that “maternal serum IGF-I is significantly related to GA, maternal BW, and BMI during pregnancy.” In fact, there are some previous reports on this issue. Pathmaperuma et al. made a completely different observation. In their report, it was reported that serum IGF-I “did not correlate with newbo...