The mammalian embryo is encased in a glycoproteinaceous coat, the zona pellucida (ZP) during preimplantation development. Prior to implantation, the blastocyst must undergo 'hatching' or ZP escape. In hamsters, there is a thinning of the ZP followed by a focal lysis and a complete dissolution of the ZP during blastocyst hatching. Earlier studies from our laboratory have indicated a role for cys...

Spider graphs are the intersection graphs of subtrees of subdivisions of stars. Thus, spider graphs are chordal graphs that form a common superclass of interval and split graphs. Motivated by previous results on the existence of Hamilton cycles in interval, split and chordal graphs, we show that every 3/2-tough spider graph is hamiltonian. The obtained bound is best possible since there are (3/...

The present study examines attentional and implicit memory biases in spider phobic and nonphobic participants. The results showed that spider phobics demonstrated increased interference for neutral, negative, and spider-relevant words on a computerized Stroop task. However, no group differences emerged when adjusting for differences in color-naming speed. Prior exposure to a dead spider did res...

BACKGROUND This review provides the physician with a clinical approach to the diagnosis and management of spider bites. It examines the recent literature concerning management of bites causing dermonecrosis, secondary infection, neuromuscular damage, and allergic reactions. METHODS Using the key words "spider bites," "brown recluse spider bites," "necrotic arachnidism," "black widow spider bi...

The hobo spider, Tegenaria agrestis (Walckenaer), and the related Tegenaria duellica Simon are very similar European spiders that have become well established in the northwestern United States and British Columbia. The hobo spider is considered to be medically important; T. duellica is considered harmless but is often misidentified as the hobo spider. The current distribution of the hobo spider...

in the present study, sulfuric acid was used for artemia cysts decapsulation. cysts of artemia franciscana were hatched out in regular manner or following hypochlorite or acid decapsulation. two acid concentrations (1 and 5%), three acid immersion times (10, 30 and 50 min) were used and hatching rates were recorded after 15, 18 and 24 h incubation. hatching rates increased but hatching time dec...

Some of the world's most dangerous spiders have been certified in some areas of Iran. Spider bites are common in some geographical areas, and are sporadic in some regions. Spider bites can be classified as latrodectism or loxoscelism. If the patient had not seen the spider, the clinical manifestations of latrodectism could be easily mistaken for other types of bite or sting; or an infectious di...

We describe the strategies and implementation details we employed to parallelize the SPIDER software package on distributed-memory parallel computers using the message passing interface (MPI). The MPI-enabled SPIDER preserves the interactive command line and batch interface used in the sequential version of SPIDER, thus does not require users to modify their existing batch programs. We show the...

The emergence of the mammalian blastocysts from their thick glycoprotein investment known as the zona pellucida is an important, but poorly understood, event in embryogenesis. In this paper, we demonstrate that peri-hatching blastocysts generate a considerably high quantum of an active oxyradical species for an extremely short period of time when compared to the pre-hatching (unhatched) and pos...