StAR protein is expressed in both medulla and cortex of the bovine and rat adrenal gland

We have employed polyclonal antibodies to a peptide sequence of bovine steroidogenic acute regulatory (StAR) protein and human placental 3beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (3beta-HSD) to determine the localisation and distribution of these proteins in rat and bovine adrenal glands. Immunohistochemical staining demonstrated the presence of StAR protein in the zona glomerulosa (ZG), zona fasciculata (ZF), zona reticularis (ZR) and in the medulla of both species. For 3beta-HSD, immunostaining was observed in the ZG, ZF and ZR of the rat adrenal and was absent in the medulla. Immunoblotting experiments showed intense bands for StAR protein (30 kDa, 37 kDa) in the mitochondria of bovine ZG, ZF and medulla and a less intense band (30 kDa) in the microsomes. In rat ZG and ZF/R mitochondria only the 30 kDa protein was present. For 3beta-HSD, an intense band (42 kDa) was found in microsomes and mitochondria of rat and bovine ZG and ZFR. A very faint signal for 3beta-HSD was seen in adrenal medulla. In conclusion, StAR (or a closely related) protein is present throughout the adrenal gland in rat and bovine species in contrast to 3beta-HSD which is confined to the steroidogenic zones. The possible function of StAR protein in the adrenal medulla merits investigation.     

Cluster analysis in industrial market segmentation through artificial neural network

Market segmentation has commonly applied cluster analysis. This study intends to make the comparison of conventional two-stage method with proposed two-stage method through the simulated data. The proposed two-stage method is the combination of self-organizing feature maps and K-means method. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is better than the conventional two-stage method based on the rate of misclassification.     

Quasi-saturation capacitance behavior of a DMOS device

This paper reports a simulation study on the capacitance characteristics of a double-diffused metal-oxide semiconductor (DMOS) device operating in the quasi-saturation region. From the analysis, the capacitance effect of the gate oxide upon the drift region cannot be modeled as an overlap capacitance, because the drain-gate/source-gate capacitances of the DMOS device may exceed the gate-oxide capacitance due to the larger voltage drop over the gate oxide than the change in the imposed gate bias when entering the quasi-saturation region. This effect can be the explanation for the plateau behavior in the gate charge plot during turn-on and turn-off of the DMOS device. Based on the small-signal equivalent capacitance model, the accumulated charge in the drift region below the gate oxide may thoroughly associate with the drain terminal in the prequasi-saturation region and with the source terminal in the quasi-saturation region     

T cell responsiveness correlates differentially with antibody isotype levels in clinical and asymptomatic filariasis

To establish the relationships among T and B cell responses, active infection, and clinical manifestations in lymphatic filariasis, filarial-specific lymphocyte proliferation, IgG antibody isotypes, and IgE levels were determined in an exposed population: 31 asymptomatic amicrofilaremics, 43 microfilaremics, 12 symptomatic amicrofilaremics, and 52 elephantiasis patients. Lymphocyte proliferation was higher in elephantiasis patients and asymptomatic amicrofilaremics than in microfilaremics (P < .004). A proportion of asymptomatic amicrofilaremics (32%), elephantiasis patients (37%), and symptomatic amicrofilaremics (58%) showed antigen-specific lymphocyte unresponsiveness, and lymphocyte proliferation to filarial antigens correlated negatively with specific IgG4 levels (rho = -0.315, P < .001). As elevated specific IgG4 is an indicator of active infection, it is argued that active infection may result in lymphocyte hyporesponsiveness irrespective of clinical category. Of those with elevated specific IgE levels and high T cell proliferative responses, 70% had elephantiasis, suggesting these factors have a role in pathology. However, the existence of a proportion of elephantiasis patients with low anti-filarial IgE and T cell unresponsiveness to filarial antigens suggests that elephantiasis can be caused by distinct processes.     

More investigations of leakage and nonleakage conductor-backedcoplanar waveguide

Through rigorous full-wave analysis, the effective dielectric constant, normalized attenuation constant, characteristic impedance, and radiation pattern of two types of conductor-backed coplanar waveguides are obtained. The analytic results show that the leakage effect is not only controlled by the thickness and dielectric constant of the substrate but also by the slot width. The leakage power transforms to a radiation space wave and a surface wave, the transverse electric field diagrams in the substrate and the far-zone radiation pattern verify the leakage phenomenon. The first structure has the maximum radiation intensity in the endfire direction, while the second one which has more leaky waves radiates into the air, is better served as a radiating device. For both structures under the nonleakage condition, the characteristic impedance is sensitive to the change of the strip width but not the slot width. Using these properties, the nonleaky and leaky circuits can exist on the same circuit board by choosing appropriate circuit dimensions     

Flows in rectangular microchannels driven by capillary force and gravity

Capillary phenomena was studied and discussed by the scholars about 200 years ago, but the progress was slow due to the limited equipment and manufacture precision of the microchannel. In recent years, because of the rapid development of MEMS and micromachining, many applications of the capillary flow is widely developing in some modern processes, such as underfilling of flip chip, flow in microfluidic chip or biochip, and a variety of other fields.     

A compact LTCC branch-line coupler UsingModified-T equivalent-circuit modelfor transmission line

In this letter, a compact branch-line coupler is proposed by making good use of the three-dimensional layout capability of the low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate. This branch-line coupler is accomplished by using lumped-inductors and lumped-capacitors to realize the modified-T equivalent-circuit model for the transmission line so that the circuit size may drastically be reduced. Specifically, a very compact LTCC branch-line coupler with a size of 0.079/spl lambda//spl times/0.0717/spl lambda/ is implemented and carefully examined, where /spl lambda/ is the wavelength of the multilayer structure at the operating frequency f/sub 0/.     

Dynamic RSVP protocol

RSVP is a resource reservation setup protocol that can be used by a host to request specific QoS for multicast multimedia flows on the Internet. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) architecture also needs RSVP. The fact that the resolutions of the display system used in different receiver nodes might have different, multi-resolution characteristics is supported in the MPEG-4 standard, and the EZW compression algorithm can cease decoding at any point in the bitstream. However, RSVP does not provide a more flexible mechanism. In this article we propose an extension of RSVP to provide the needed mechanism, coined dynamic RSVP (DRSVP), to dynamically adjust reserved resources on nodes without much effort. It provides different video resolutions to different receiver nodes with different needed reserved resources. Therefore, it does not waste precious Internet resources to transmit unnecessary multimedia packets.     

p53 protein expression in extrahepatic bile duct cancer

p53 mutations, a tumor suppressor gene located on chromosome 17p, are the most common genetic alterations found in human cancers. Although the p53 expression or mutation has been investigated in a variety of cancers there have been very few studies in extrahepatic bile duct cancers. In this study, we investigated the immunohistochemical expression of p53 in formalin fixed paraffin embedded archival specimens of 36 extrahepatic bile duct cancers in which p53 expression was found in eighteen (50%) cases. There was no significant difference in age, gender, size of tumor, histologic grade, extent of tumor involvement, lymph node metastasis and tumor resectability according to p53 immunoreactivity. Comparison of survival duration according to p53 expression showed no significant difference. In conclusion, we reported 50 percent of p53 expression in extrahepatic bile duct cancers by immunohistochemical staining and we found no prognostic significance of p53 expression in dinicopathologic parameters.