Potential applications of pulsating joint loading in sports medicine.

Because bone is responsive to mechanical loading, pulsating joint loading (PJL), which laterally applies oscillatory mechanical loads to joints, can be explored for preventive conditioning and therapeutic treatments. Herein, the general features of PJL are reviewed, and its potential usage for sports medicine is discussed.

Joint loading modality: its application to bone formation and fracture healing.

Sports-related injuries such as impact and stress fractures often require a rehabilitation programme to stimulate bone formation and accelerate fracture healing. This review introduces a recently developed joint loading modality and evaluates its potential applications to bone formation and fracture healing in post-injury rehabilitation. Bone is a dynamic tissue whose structure is constantly altered in response to its mechanical environments.

Amphibian in vitro heart induction: a simple and reliable model for the study of vertebrate cardiac development.

Amphibian embryos are an excellent model system for analyzing the mechanisms of vertebrate cardiogenesis. Studies of heart development in Xenopus have, for example, revealed that the inductive interaction of the heart primordia with the adjacent underlying endoderm and dorsal lip starts at the early stages of gastrulation. However, the molecular basis of those early inductive events and the genes expressed during the early phases of heart differentiation remain largely unknown.

Future opportunities for life science programs in space.

Most space-related life science programs are expensive and time-consuming, requiring international cooperation and resources with trans-disciplinary expertise. A comprehensive future program in "life sciences in space" needs, therefore, well-defined research goals and strategies as well as a sound ground-based program. The first half of this review will describe four key aspects such as the environment in space, previous accomplishments in space (primarily focusing on amphibian embryogenesis), available resources, and recent advances in bioinformatics and biotechnology, whose clear understanding is imperative for defining future directions.

Student-oriented learning: an inquiry-based developmental biology lecture course.

In this junior-level undergraduate course, developmental life cycles exhibited by various organisms are reviewed, with special attention--where relevant--to the human embryo. Morphological features and processes are described and recent insights into the molecular biology of gene expression are discussed. Ways are studied in which model systems, including marine invertebrates, amphibia, fruit flies and other laboratory species are employed to elucidate general principles which apply to fertilization, cleavage, gastrulation and organogenesis.