Blood Collection Procedure of Laboratory Primates: A Neglected Variable in Biomedical Research

A survey of 75 biomedical articles dealing with stress-dependent blood parameters in caged primates revealed that the conditions under which blood collection occurred were in most cases described either not at all or so haphazardly that it would be impossible to determine if humane handling procedures were used and basic principles of scientific methodology applied. These findings were unexpected because there is ample scientific evidence not only that stress-sensitive research data are influenced by traditional blood sampling procedures, but also that those data-biasing effects can be avoided. If dependent variables of the blood collection procedure are not controlled, data variability will increase, automatically increasing the number of animals needed for statistical analysis. For ethical and scientific reasons, it was recommended that editors of biomedical journals require authors to provide sufficient information of the blood collection--and, when applicable, the sedative injection--procedure to ensure that the experiment was done with the smallest number of animals possible to achieve statistical significance and that the investigation can be replicated reliably in another laboratory and the research data interpreted with reasonable accuracy.     

Cardiotrophin-1 review

Background: Cardiotrophin-1 is newly discovered chemokin with a lot of functions. Aim of our work was to describe most important of them. Methods: systematically scan of available scientific resources. Results: Cardiotrophin-1 stimulates the proliferation of cardiomyocytes. Cardiotrophin-1 expression and plasma values are elevated in individuals with heart failure and have high diagnostic efficacy for the heart failure. Plasma values are also an independent prognostic factor. Preliminary findings suggest that the determination of plasma cardiotrophin-1 may be useful for the follow-up of hypertensive heart disease in routine clinical practice. Cardiotrophin-1 also plays an important cardioprotective effect on myocardial damage, is a potent regulator of signaling in adipocytes in vitro and in vivo and potentiates the elevation the acute-phase proteins. Cardiotrophin-1 may play also an important protective role in other organ systems (such as hematopoietic, neuronal, developmental). Conclusion: Cardiotrophin is a newly discovered chemokin with a lot of system effects and is stable in system circulation hence permitting its development in the routine clinical investigation.     

Bryologische Fragmente

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Über die Lebensdauer und reparativen Potenzen bauchstrangloser Fragmente und künstlich vereinigter dorsaler Körperhälften von Criodrilus lacuum Hoffm

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

New shuttle promoter-probe vectors forE. coli andStreptomycetes

Summary Two new shuttle promoter-probe vectors forE.coli andStreptomycetes were constructed. Plasmid vectors allow the cloning of promoter-carrying DNA fragments based on the resistance to neomycin and chloramphenicol both, inE.coli andStreptomycetes. Using these vectors several promoter regions active either inE.coli orS.lividans were identified from the actinophage DNA.     

Improving performance of docking-based virtual screening by structural filtration

In the current study an innovative method of structural filtration of docked ligand poses is introduced and applied to improve the virtual screening results. The structural filter is defined by a protein-specific set of interactions that are a) structurally conserved in available structures of a particular protein with its bound ligands, and b) that can be viewed as playing the crucial role in protein-ligand binding. The concept was evaluated on a set of 10 diverse proteins, for which the corresponding structural filters were developed and applied to the results of virtual screening obtained with the Lead Finder software. The application of structural filtration resulted in a considerable improvement of the enrichment factor ranging from several folds to hundreds folds depending on the protein target. It appeared that the structural filtration had effectively repaired the deficiencies of the scoring functions that used to overestimate decoy binding, resulting into a considerably lower false positive rate. In addition, the structural filters were also effective in dealing with some deficiencies of the protein structure models that would lead to false negative predictions otherwise. The ability of structural filtration to recover relatively small but specifically bound molecules creates promises for the application of this technology in the fragment-based drug discovery.