Guinea Pig Serum L-asparaginase: Purification, and Immunological Relationship to Liver L-asparaginase and Serum L-asparaginases in Other Mammals

l-asparaginase, an enzyme used in the treatment of acute lymphocytic leukemia, is found in the serum of only a few mammalian groups, including the guinea pig and its close relatives in the superfamily Cavioidea. This report describes the purification and characterization of l-asparaginase from guinea pig serum. Antiserum against the purified enzyme cross-reacted with sera from other Cavioidean species but not with mouse serum. Relatively weak cross-reaction with unpurified l-asparaginase in guinea pig liver indicates a significant degree of evolutionary divergence.An Unassigned Group, An Unassigned DepartmentNo Full Tex

PROSTATITIS, PROSTATOSIS AND PROSTALGIA - PSYCHOGENIC OR ORGANIC-DISEASE

The term 'chronic prostatitis syndrome' (C.P.S) encompasses chronic bacterial prostatitis, chlamydia or ureaplasma-associated disease, chronic 'abacterial' prostatitis, and patients with prostatosis or prostatosis or prostalgia. Interesting observations emerged from the evaluation of the clinical material indicating that the patients with abacterial prostatitis and those with prostatosis or prostaglia group have frequent sperm abnormalities and ultrasonographic changes suggesting a more complex pathogenesis than mere congestion and neurosis. Treatment in 144 evaluable patients treated with a long-acting sulphur-trimethoprim combination was almost uniformly well tolerated; Chlamydia was eradicated in all 10 treated patients and 77.4% of patients with bacterial C.P.S. were rendered free of bacteria. Sperm abnormalities were almost invariably resistant to the treatment. Only 44.4% of patients showed a partial improvement, limited to one or more parameters. Results did not differ significantly in the various subgroup. An overall evaluation of results showed that disappearance of every presenting symptom and sign was obtained in 24.3% and a significant improvement in another 25% of patients, including those in the prostatosis-prostalgia group. These results suggest that antibacterial treatment may be followed by favourable clinical results even in patients in whom no bacteria or other aetiological agents could be isolated

Controllable patterns of parametric solitons

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Controllable patterns of parametric solitons

Peer Reviewe

Response Mixture Modeling: Accounting for Heterogeneity in Item Characteristics across Response Times

In item response theory modeling of responses and response times, it is commonly assumed that the item responses have the same characteristics across the response times. However, heterogeneity might arise in the data if subjects resort to different response processes when solving the test items. These differences may be within-subject effects, that is, a subject might use a certain process on some of the items and a different process with different item characteristics on the other items. If the probability of using one process over the other process depends on the subject’s response time, within-subject heterogeneity of the item characteristics across the response times arises. In this paper, the method of response mixture modeling is presented to account for such heterogeneity. Contrary to traditional mixture modeling where the full response vectors are classified, response mixture modeling involves classification of the individual elements in the response vector. In a simulation study, the response mixture model is shown to be viable in terms of parameter recovery. In addition, the response mixture model is applied to a real dataset to illustrate its use in investigating within-subject heterogeneity in the item characteristics across response times