The enteric nervous system (ENS) is a complex network of neurons and glia within the gut wall which originate from neural crest cells. Self-renewing, multipotential ENS progenitors have been isolated from the gut of foetal as well as adult rodents, however, the identity of the ENS progenitor and the regulation of its neurogenic potential invivo, are currently unknown. Sox10 is an HMG-containing...

Primordial germ cell (PGC) migration in zebrafish is directed by the chemokine SDF-1a that activates its receptor CXCR4b. Guided PGC migration in zebrafish thus serves as a model for chemokinedirected cell migration, a process that is relevant for a wide range of events in development, homeostasis and disease. We show that during their migration PGCs generate bleb-like protrusions that are powe...

Tendons are often subject to age related degenerative changes that coincide with a diminished regenerative capacity. Torn tendons often heal by forming scar tissue that is structurally weaker than healthy native tendon tissue, predisposing to mechanical failure. There is increasing interest in providing biological stimuli to increase the tendon reparative response. Stem cells in particular are ...

Raman spectroscopy such as spontaneous Raman spectroscopy, coherent anti-stokes Raman spectroscopy, and stimulated Raman gain spectroscopy are widely used in physics, chemistry and biology fields for investigations of vibrational modes. To our best knowledge, very few applications of Raman spectroscopy for the in-vitro and invivo patient medical diagnostics have been reported because of low sig...

A hyper-redundant manipulator has the advantage that it can be used in constraint space; however the control of hyper-redundant manipulator is difficult. This paper presents a concept of virtual link based two degrees of freedom (DOF) controller. With the proposed controller, manipulator of any number of links can be reduced to either a 2-link virtual manipulator or one real and one virtual lin...

Radiotherapy is a rapidly growing cancer treatment technique. In brachytherapy – one radiotherapy treatment technique – preand post-planning is usually carried out using CT imaging. As CT scanners cannot easily be moved from one operation room to an other and as CT does not have real-time imaging capability, alternative imaging modalities are needed to realize the vision of image guided surgery...

Background For rapid recombinant protein production in small to medium size volumes, transient transfection of mammalian cells is still the method of choice in biotechnology [1]. However, due to the high costs of commercially available lipofectamines or polycationic transfection reagents such as polyethylenimine (PEI), the most widely used transfection reagents available present a substantial e...