Spinal cord epidural stimulation for male sexual function in spinal cord injured rats.

Background: 95% of men with spinal cord injuries exhibit difficulties with sexual function, including erectile dysfunction, anejaculation, retrograde ejaculation, poor ejaculatory force, and poor sperm quality.

Aim: The primary goal is to determine if well-established interventions, such as spinal cord epidural stimulation, are a feasible treatment for sexual dysfunction and if locomotor recovery training can be used to improve ejaculatory function in a rodent model of spinal cord injury (SCI).

Methods: Male Wistar rats underwent thoracic laminectomies (shams), spinal cord transections, or moderate spinal cord contusion injuries.

The influence of electrospun fibre scaffold orientation and nano-hydroxyapatite content on the development of tooth bud stem cells in vitro.

In stem cell-based dental tissue engineering, the goal is to create tooth-like structures using scaffold materials to guide the dental stem cells. In this study, the effect of fiber alignment and hydroxyapatite content in biodegradable electrospun PLGA scaffolds have been investigated. Fiber orientation of the scaffolds was random or aligned in bundles.

Discrete phosphorylated retinoblastoma protein isoform expression in mouse tooth development.

Retinoblastoma protein (pRb) phosphorylation plays a central role in mediating cell cycle G1/S stage transition, together with E2F transcription factors. The binding of pRb to E2F is thought to be controlled by the sequential and cumulative phosphorylation of pRb at various amino acids. In addition to well characterized roles as a tumor suppressor, pRb has more recently been implicated in osteoprogenitor and other types of stem cell maintenance, proliferation and differentiation, thereby influencing the morphogenesis of developing organs.