Finally, the enhanced

benefits of vaccination strategies that target the high-risk groups are quantified. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“In the gut, dopamine is released by enteric neurons and modulates motility of small intestine smooth muscle cells. Here, we systematically analyzed the dopamine-induced effects on the longitudinal smooth muscle of different sections of the rat isolated A 1155463 small intestine. We found that exogenous dopamine had biphasic effects and could lead to both an early contraction and a late relaxation, depending on the region of small intestine. Thus, dopamine-induced early contractions were commonly observed in the duodenum, but less frequently in the jejunum, and rarely in the ileum. The amplitudes

of these early contractions showed a striking regional dependence (duodenum > jejunum > ileum) and were significantly blocked by SCH23390 and raclopride. Conversely, dopamine-induced late relaxations were regularly obtained in the ileum and in the jejunum, but less frequently in the duodenum. Interestingly, the amplitudes of these relaxations showed an inverse regional dependence (ileum > jejunum > duodenum), and were insensitive to dopamine receptor antagonists. Rather, they were significantly inhibited by propranolol and prazosin. We conclude that dopamine exerts differential effects on smooth muscle motility in different regions within the rat small intestine. In proximal parts, dopamine predominantly causes D(1) and D(2) dopamine receptor-dependent contraction, whereas it leads selleck kinase inhibitor to alpha and beta adrenoceptor-dependent relaxation in more distal

parts. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“In living cells proteins motilities regulate the spatiotemporal dynamics of molecular pathways. We consider here a reaction-diffusion model of mutual kinase-receptor activation showing that the strength of positive feedback is controlled by the kinase diffusion coefficient. For high diffusion, the activated kinase molecules quickly leave the vicinity of the cell membrane and cannot efficiently activate the receptors. As a selleck chemicals result, in a broad range of parameters, the cell can be activated only if the kinase diffusion coefficient is sufficiently small. Our simple model shows that change in the motility of substrates may dramatically influence the cell responses. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“GFAP has long been adopted as the specific marker for pituicyte, a special type of astrocyte. GFAP and S100 beta are two commonly used astrocyte markers. Their immunoreactivities differ in different regions of the brain. To our knowledge this issue has not been studied in pituicyte. In our preliminary study, we found that antibodies against GFAP and S100 beta stained the pituicytes differently. A detailed investigation with both light and electron microscopic techniques was thus conducted in the rat. At light microscopic level, anti-GFAP and anti-S100 beta stained 66.78% and 86.