BACKGROUND Ovarian tissue cryopreservation is a promising technique to safeguard fertility in cancer patients. However, in some types of cancer, there is a risk of transmitting malignant cells present in the cryopreserved tissue. To avoid such a risk, pre-antral follicles could be isolated from ovarian tissue and grown in vitro. On the basis of this assumption, the aim of our study was to inves...

The cDNA for interleukin-7 (IL-7) was recently isolated from a stromal cell line derived from a long-term B-lymphoid culture. We report that purified recombinant murine IL-7 can promote the clonal growth in semi-solid culture of a subpopulation of cells expressing the B220 surface antigen from normal murine bone marrow. These colony-forming cells (CFC-Pre-B) give rise to colonies of 20 to 1,000...

Anticancer drug discovery has long been hampered by the poor predictivity of the preclinical models. There is a growing realization that the tumor microenvironment is a critical determinant of the response of cancer cells to therapeutic agents. The past 5 years have seen a great deal of progress in our understanding of how the three-dimensional microenvironment modulates the signaling behavior ...

Immunological studies were performed on a woman with severe pre-eclamptic toxaemia in a second pregnancy. This pregnancy followed a normal twin pregnancy by a different father four years earlier. Both fathers were also studied. In the mixed lymphocyte culture the patient's lymphocytes reacted eight times as strongly against father 2's cells as against those from father 1. If studies along these...

Computer-automated detection of viable cells of varying size, shape, and contrast is a prerequisite for monitoring cell behavior including migration in three-dimensional (3-D) tissue cultures. By using a 3-D collagen matrix migration model, we describe an efficient three-stage segmentation algorithm for different cell types. (1) Preprocessing by a rational operator is combined with (2) region g...

background: this study was designed to develop a new co-culture system, assess the effect of luteinizing hormone (lh) using sequential media to promote development and increase the quality of 2-cell murine embryos through the 8-16 cell stage to morula and blastocyst stages. materials and methods: monolayers for co-culture were prepared from ovine oviduct epithelial cells (ooec) in dmem/f12 medi...