Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor increases CD123hi blood dendritic cells with altered CD62L and CCR7 expression

Changes in blood dendritic cell (BDC) counts (CD123(hi)BDC and CD11c(+)BDC) and expression of CD62L, CCR7, and CD49d were analyzed in healthy donors, multiple myeloma (MM), and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) patients, who received granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) containing peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) mobilization protocols. Low-dose G-CSF in healthy donors (8-10 mug/ kg/d subcutaneously) and high-dose G-CSF in patients (30 mug/kg/d) increased CD123(hi)BDC (2- to 22-fold, mean 3.7 x 10(6)/ L-17.7 x 10(6)/L and 1.9 x 10(6)/L-12.0 x 10(6)/ L) in healthy donors and MM but decreased CD11c(+)BDC (2- to 10-fold, mean 5.7 x 10(6)/L-1.6 x 10(6)/L) in NHL patients, on the day of apheresis, compared with steady state. After apheresis, CD123(hi)BDC counts remained high, whereas low CD11c(+)BDC counts tended to recover in the following 2-5 days. Down-regulation of CD62L and up-regulation of CCR7 on CD123(hi)BDC were found in most healthy donors and MM patients. CD49d expression was unchanged. Thus, PBSC mobilization may change BDC counts by altering molecules necessary for BDC homing from blood into tissues.

Behavioral and physiological responses to stabling in naive horses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the response of horses to confinement and isolation in a stable (indoor individual housing) for the first time using behavioral indices, heart rate, and salivary cortisol concentration. Six naive 2-year-old Australian Stock Horse fillies were examined at 4-hour intervals over 24 hours in an outdoor group paddock followed by 24 hours in indoor individual housing. Behavioral observations and scores and heart rates were recorded and saliva samples were taken at each interval. During stabling, all horses became agitated and demonstrated increased vocalization and movement. Behavioral scores were significantly higher in the indoor individual housing (P

Boosting the tree augmented naive bayes classifier

The Tree Augmented Naïve Bayes (TAN) classifier relaxes the sweeping independence assumptions of the Naïve Bayes approach by taking account of conditional probabilities. It does this in a limited sense, by incorporating the conditional probability of each attribute given the class and (at most) one other attribute. The method of boosting has previously proven very effective in improving the performance of Naïve Bayes classifiers and in this paper, we investigate its effectiveness on application to the TAN classifier.