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A functional membrane is requisite for the fertilizing ability of spermatozoa, as it plays an integral role in sperm capacitation, acrosome reaction, and binding of the spermatozoon to the egg surface. The hypo-osmotic swelling (HOS) test evaluates the functional integrity of the sperm’s ...

Proper assessment of the number of spermatozoa is essential not only as an initial step in every clinical infertility investigation but also when attempting to establish the total sperm production in the testis . Reliable methods combined with an understanding of the specific physiology ...

Short (or small) interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are double-stranded RNA molecules about 21–25 nucleotides long that have the capacity to disrupt the activity of genes on a posttranscriptional level. This sequence homology-driven gene silencing capacity has been utilized by researchers ...

In vertebrate embryogenesis, the primordia of the nervous systems arise from uncommitted ectoderm during gastrulation. Spemann and Mangold demonstrated that the dorsal lip of the amphibian blastopore, which gives rise mainly to axial mesoderm, emanates inductive factors that di ...

Neutrophils are one of main cellular elements of innate immune system that act as the first line of host defense against invasion by microorganisms. Neutrophils phagocytose and kill microbes through production of toxins such as hydrogen peroxide, superoxide anion, and nitric oxide. Rec ...

Polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMNs) generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) during phagocytosis and in response to soluble agonists. This functional response, termed oxidative burst, contributes to host defense, but it can also result in collateral damage of host tissues. To stu ...

Neutrophils are constitutively produced throughout adult life and are essential for host responses to many types of pathogen. Neutropenia has long been associated with poor prognosis in the clinic, yet we have an incomplete understanding of their life cycle, not only during homeostasis ...

Electron microscopy (EM) is the only technique that can combine sensitive protein-detection methods with detailed information on the substructure of cellular compartments. The purpose of this chapter is to describe some of the methods at the EM level that can be used to analyze the spatial or ...

One of the major challenges in post-genomic research is to understand how physiological and pathological phenotypes arise from the networks or connectivity of expressed genes. In addressing this issue, we have developed two computational algorithms, CoExMiner and PathwayPro, to e ...

Mounting pressures in pharmaceutical research necessitate ever increasing efficiency to lower cost and produce results. This is especially true in the realm of high-throughput screening (HTS) where large pharmaceutical companies historically test many hundreds of thousan ...

This chapter provides an overview of statistical methods for genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in animals, plants, and humans. The simplest form of GWAS, a marker-by-marker analysis, is illustrated with a simple example. The problem of selecting a significance threshold that acco ...

Screening is about making decisions on the modulating activity of one particular compound on a biological system. When a compound testing experiment is repeated under the same conditions or as close to the same conditions as possible, the observed results are never exactly the same, and there is ...

Inhibitors of kinase activities can be mechanistically diverse, genomically selective, and pathway sensitive. This potential has made these biological targets the focus of a number of drug discovery and development programs in the pharmaceutical industry. To this end, the high-thr ...

Ontologies are fundamental knowledge representations that provide not only standards for annotating and indexing biological information, but also the basis for implementing functional classification and interpretation models. This chapter discusses the application ...

磷脂类药用辅料的发展经历了三代，分别为一代天然磷脂，二代合成磷脂和三代衍生化磷脂。第一代：天然磷脂。20世纪60年代，卡比率先将蛋黄卵磷脂用于脂肪乳乳化剂，从而开创了肠外营养的脂肪乳时代，蛋黄卵磷脂也作为药用辅料开始了规模化生产和应用。而卡比开发的蛋黄卵磷脂产品成为经典，成为各家效仿的对象，并诞生了PL-100M、Dossan等品牌。随着脂肪乳在载药技术上的应用，因前列地尔等药物的特殊要求，出现了新型的蛋黄卵磷脂 ...

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. One in three men and one in ten women develop severe cardiovascular disease before the age of 60, resulting in health expenditures of over $100 billion per year. Even though cardiovascular disease primarily affects peo ...

It has been recognized that eucaryotic cells respond to different external stimuli by activation of mechanisms of cell signaling. One of the major systems participating in the transduction of signal from the cell membrane to nuclear and other intracellular targets is the highly conserv ...

During evolutionary processes, the development of aerobic metabolism has led to the liberation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in living creatures by leakage from terminal oxidation and other enzymatic processes even under physiological conditions. Free radicals have unpair ...

The development of therapeutic angiogenesis promises to revolutionize the treatment of coronary artery disease (CAD) by providing, for the first time, means to medically restore circulation to ischemic areas of the heart. Because of such promise, this area of therapeutics has undergo ...

Congestive heart failure is a major health problem in terms of morbidity, mortality, increasing prevalence in the population, and economic burden to the health care system. The scope of the problem is evident by looking at the numbers (1): hospital discharges for heart failure increased 155.2% in ...