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No / Purpose: The hollow fiber assay is used successfully as a routine in vivo screening model to quantitatively define anticancer activity by the National Cancer Institute. This study investigates whether the hollow fiber assay can be used as a short-term in vivo model to demonstrate specific pharmacodynamic end points, namely microtubule and cell cycle disruption. Experimental Design: The growth of A549 cells was characterized within hollow fibers over 5 days in vivo at both subcutaneous (s.c.) and intraperitoneal (i.p.) sites. Drugs were administered on day 4 (i.p.). Results: At 24 hours, cells were retrieved from fibers at both i.p. and s.c. sites of paclitaxel-treated (20 mg/kg) and combretastatin A1 phosphate¿treated (150 mg/kg) mice. Cell cycle analysis after paclitaxel treatment revealed a mean G2-M phase population of 48.04% (i.p.) and 25.76% (s.c.) compared with vehicle group mice (6.78 and 5.56%, respectively; P = <0.001 and 0.005, respectively). Tumor cells retrieved from combretastatin A1 phosphate¿treated mice had a mean G2-M phase population of 36.3% (i.p.) and 29.36% (s.c.) compared with cells retrieved from vehicle group mice (5.58 and 5.49%, respectively; P = <0.001). Using fluorescence and laser-confocal microscopy, paclitaxel was revealed to induce the formation of spindle asters and tubulin polymerization. Combretastatin A1 phosphate was shown to hold cells in mitosis. Changes in nuclear morphology were also observed. Conclusion: These data demonstrate that the hollow fiber assay can be used as a short-term in vivo model for studying the pharmacodynamic effects of both standard and novel compounds on microtubules. Evidence has also been provided to support the routine use of the in vivo hollow fiber assay for demonstrating the mechanism of action of a drug.

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This essay examines if there is any difference how the two biggest tabloids in Sweden, Aftonbladet and Expressen is portraying the Swedish national football team for both woman and men. The purpose is to compare and see if there is any difference regarding what gender you have. We have also examined what gender the authors for the articles have. We have used a quantitative content analysis to get our results. In conclusion, there is a big difference in medial space regarding what gender you have. But there is no significant difference how the reporters are using their language depending what national team they’re writing about. There is also a big majority of male reporters that writes about the national teams.

In this thesis I examine the placement of the dependent genitive relative to its head noun in Classical Latin prose. The corpus is drawn from the works of four first-century B.C. authors: Caesar, Cicero, Sallust and Varro. The thesis itself is split into two main sections, a qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis discusses a number of factors that may influence genitive position, drawn from literature on the subject as well as my pilot studies. These factors are information structure, the genitive’s grammatical function, discontinuity, lexical category, animacy, prepositions governing the head noun, reported speech, idioms, lexical items, and grammatical number of the genitive. This analysis examines individual instances of genitive position in context, providing examples and counter-examples of the ordering patterns found with each potential factor. The qualitative analysis suggests that a number of these factors have an effect on genitive position, particularly information structure. These results are tested by the quantitative analysis. By performing a multivariate statistical analysis using the programme GoldVarb, the combined effects of multiple factors are determined and the statistically significant factors ranked in order of importance and strength of effect. The statistics show that information structure is the most important of the factors. Other significant influences are the presence of prepositions, the function of the genitive and its lexical category. By combining the two types of analysis, qualitative and quantitative, this thesis shows in detail how the factors combine to influence word order, which of them are independent, which interact, which are important and which have little to no effect at all, resulting in a better understanding of the data and the way that the contextual factors work together to produce the variant orders of the dependent genitive.

At embryonic day 3.5 (E3.5), inner cell mass (ICM) cells co-express the transcription factors NANOG and GATA6. Between E3.5 and E4.5, cells of the ICM differentiate into epiblast (Epi) and primitive endoderm (PrE). These two lineages are distinguished by the differential expression of the previously coexpressed transcription factors; Epi cells express NANOG while PrE cells express GATA6. FGF/ERK signalling is responsible for Epi and PrE differentiation but it does not explain the initial co-expression of both factors and how the mutually exclusive expression arises. β-catenin is the downstream effector of Wnt signalling, and it is also found in the membrane forming a complex with E-cadherin. Depending on it subcellular location, β-catenin has been associated with pluripotency and differentiation of mESCs, whose origin is the mouse embryo. My hypothesis was that changes in both cellular pools of β-catenin are involved in ICM differentiation. To characterize Wnt/β-catenin role during preimplantation development, I applied quantitative immunofluorescence analysis (QIF) together with chemical and classical genetics in in vitro and in vivo models. I found that high membrane β-catenin levels are associated with Epi cells from E4.0 stage, while nuclear β-catenin levels are higher in co-expressing cells at E3.5 and PrE precursors at E4.0. My results indicate that increases in nuclear β-catenin levels allow the ICM cells to be specified earlier, determined by an earlier appearance of mutually exclusive expression of GATA6 and NANOG in vitro and ex vivo. Moreover, increased β-catenin levels promote specification towards PrE fate, observed by the presence of higher percentages of PrE cells. Conversely, a decrease in β-catenin levels result in slower ICM specification into Epi and PrE. Finally, modulation of FGF/ERK signalling in mouse embryos, which is the main pathway in this cell fate choice, led to changes in β-catenin subcellular location and levels. Altogether, my results are consistent with a role for Wnt/β-catenin signalling facilitating PrE fate acquisition concomitantly with FGF/ERK signalling.

Through the observation of conversations on Internet Relay Chat and the quantitative analysis of “chat-logs”, I investigate the characteristics of this form of communication unique to the digital realm. My research rests on a theoretical framework integrating the semiotic and pragmatism of Charles S. Peirce (as primary groundwork) with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the sociology of Erving Goffman, to grasp shared significations in cyberspace simultaneously as logical process and as social practice. This exploratory case study yields evidence supporting the potential fruitfulness of Peircean philosophy as the foundation for a new paradigm in empirical communication research, and successfully puts to the test a particular type of method (computational and diagrammatic) suggested to accomplish such research.