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Sperm morphometry is a part of the semen analysis based on CASA technology and has shown a big role in the prediction of male fertility. This analysis implies the use of stain techniques, although it has been shown that staining can make dramatic changes in the cell morphometry in different species. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the differences in sperm morphometry in Alpaca, introduced by the use of different stain techniques. Single ejaculates from five adult alpacas were used. Samples were recovered by deferent duct deviation surgery technique. Three stain techniques (i.e. Hemacolor, Harri’s Henatoxylin and Diff-Quik) were evaluated. Morphometric analysis was done using ISAS® v1 CASA-Morph system, at 100x bright field objective magnification and a digital video camera with a final resolution of 0.08 µm/pixel. Almost 200 randomly selected cells were automatically analysed per sample and stain technique, considering several sperm-head and midpiece parameters regarding size and shape. Almost all of the parameters showed different levels of difference among the employed techniques. In general, the largest cell heads were the ones stained with Harri’s Hematoxylin and the smallest ones were the ones stained with Diff-Quik. The discriminant parameters used to differentiate between animals better were the head width, area and acrosome percentage. In conclusion, like in other species, alpaca sperm morphometry results were found to be sensitive to the applied stain technique. This implies the necessity of referring clearly the stain technique used in each case to perform comparisons between different works on the same species. None of the employed techniques was superior to the others. In addition, the method used to obtain the samples showed its usefulness and simplicity for repeated samplings.
 
 
 

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Yarrowia lipolytica, as a good cell factory to speed up the production of plant pharmaceutical components, has been considered to be one of the most important and attractive micro-organisms in recent years, due to its high secretion capacity, limited glycosylation, large range of genetic markers and molecular tools. Naringenin, as a central core of flavonoids production, plays important roles both in plants and in the treatment of different types of human diseases. For this purpose, specific naringenin biosynthesis genes from different origins were selected and introduced after comparative expression profiling in Y. lipolytica. This research indicated that chs plays the main role in the production of naringenin, so the increase copy number of this gene in each construct was investigated. The HPLC results confirmed that the construct with 5 copy numbers of chs resulted in 7.14 fold increase of naringenin extracellular titer to 90.16 mg/L in shake flask cultures. The results reported in this study demonstrated that sufficient knowledge of genes involved in the specific biosynthesis pathway, synthetic gene pathway and using Y. lipolytica as a capable and cheap host could help bioengineers to produce significant amounts of pharmaceutical components.
 
 

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Comparison of morphological structures is a key element in evolutionary biology and taxonomy, as well as in the studies concerning variation and biodiversity either at interspecific or intraspecific levels. This study aimed to compare the bony structures of Chondrostoma orientale and C. nasus. For this purpose, three specimens of C. orientale from the Kor River (passing through Iran), and five specimens of C. nasus from the Danube (passing through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine), Dnieper (passing through Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) and Rhône river basins (passing through Switzerland and France), as well as Lake Ohrid (Located between Macedonia and Albania) were analysed. The results showed that the two anterior lateral processes of supraethmoid bone were more distant in C. orientale than those in C. nasus. The anterior profile of the supraetmoid bone was concave in C. orientale, while it was almost flat in C. nasus. The posterior pharyngeal process in the basioccipital was wide and triangular in C. orientale and narrow and rectangular in C. nasus. The maxillary mid-lateral ascending process was slightly inclined forward in C. orientale, while it was slightly inclined backward in C. nasus. The maxillary distal process was long in C. orientale and it was short in C. nasus. The premaxillary had a rostral ascending process in C. orientale, while it was missing in C. nasus. The anterior portion of the dentary was narrow and elongated in C. orientale and the coronoid process was perpendicular and located in the middle of the dentary; in contrast, the anterior portion of the dentary was short and wide in C. nasus and the coronoid process was inclined forward.
 

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S-layer proteins of Deinococcus radiodurans are the best self-assemble systems among other proteins that have an essential role in the fabrication of nanowires. Therefore, the purification of these proteins is necessary. The purpose of this research was to optimize the purification of s-layer protein from D. radiodurans with the response surface method. The three factors of SDS concentration, incubation time and mass percent in five levels were considered, and 20 runs were designed by Design-Expert software with a central composite method. Each run includes microbe culture, mass cell preparation, microbe incubation in specific SDS concentration and time and mass percent, separation of the bacteria from detergent with a centrifuge at 5000g, sedimentation of s-layer proteins from detergent solution with a centrifuge at 20000g, determination of protein concentration, and protein purity by Bradford and SDS-PAGE methods, respectively. Finally, the data obtained were analyzed.  Analysis of the results demonstrated that at the 95% confidence level, the effect of the detergent concentration factor on the purified protein percent was more than other factors. The optimization results of factors are 5.64% SDS concentration, 7.33% mass percent, and 3 hours incubation time. At optimized conditions the protein concentration and purity percent were obtained 0.584 mg/ml and 47.61% respectively.