We demonstrated that alpha-2 adrenoceptor agonists enhanced the local anesthetic action of lidocaine, and suggest that dexmedetomidine acts via alpha-2A adrenoceptors.

Most agreement systems target a grammatical entity within the sentence, typically the subject but in some cases the object or the dative. There is another kind of agreement found in languages such as Souletin, a Basque dialect, that targets the hearer. I will look at this type of so-called allocutive agreement and pursue two main issues. First, although it targets the hearer, the form of the agreement is the same as the regular phi-feature agreement used for subject/ object. This means that the allocutive agreement must be part of a probe-goal relation, leading to the question, where is the goal? I argue that something like Ross's Performative Analysis furnishes the second-person goal. Second, the distribution of the allocutive agreement is essentially the same as the politeness marking on the verb in Japanese, which leads to the hypothesis that, despite Japanese being characterized as a typical agreementless language, the politeness marker is, in fact, an implementation of second-person agreement. Moreover, this allocutive agreement in Japanese has a distribution that limits it to the root clause as originally conceived by Emonds (1969). * I am grateful to Liliane Haegeman for extensive comments on an earlier version that helped shape this work as well as to two anonymous reviewers. I also thank Hiroki Maezawa, Hideki Maki, Asako Uchibori, Yukiko Ueda, Reiko Vermeulen, and the audiences at the GIST2 conference on the Main Clause Phenomena at Ghent University in November 2010 and at a class at the Nagoya University in June 2011 for their comments and suggestions.

SummaryInduced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) can serve as a source of cardiomyocytes (CMs) to treat end-stage heart failure; however, transplantation of genetically dissimilar iPSCs even within species (allogeneic) can induce immune rejection. We hypothesized that this might be limited by matching the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) antigens between the donor and the recipient. We therefore transplanted fluorescence-labeled (GFP) iPSC-CMs donated from a macaque with homozygous MHC haplotypes into the subcutaneous tissue and hearts of macaques having heterozygous MHC haplotypes (MHC-matched; group I) or without identical MHC alleles (group II) in conjunction with immune suppression. Group I displayed a higher GFP intensity and less immune-cell infiltration in the graft than group II. However, MHC-matched transplantation with single or no immune-suppressive drugs still induced a substantial host immune response to the graft. Thus, the immunogenicity of allogeneic iPSC-CMs was reduced by MHC-matched transplantation although a requirement for appropriate immune suppression was retained for successful engraftment.

Ditransitive verbs such as send and give appear in two distinct structures in English, the double object and the to-dative constructions. It is well known that the two differ semantically and syntactically. In some recent works, it is suggested that the semantic differences observed by Bresnan (1978), Oehrle(1978) and others, and the structural properties noted by Barss and Lasnik (1986), Larson (1988), and others, can both be captured by postulating an extra head for the DOC (e.g., Marantz 1993, Harley 1995, Pylkkänen 2002. This head, which corresponds to the applicative head in Bantu languages, takes the goal as its specifier, and relates it to the VP that contains the verb and the theme (Marantz 1993), or directly to the theme (Pylkkänen 2002). The applicative head contributes the meaning distinct to the DOC and it gives rise to the hierarchical structure noted by Barss and Lasnik. This applicative head is missing in the todative, so that this construction has an argument structure distinct from the DOC.In this paper, we will look at the corresponding construction(s) in Japanese.Unlike English, Japanese appears only to have one structure, in which the goal is marked with the dative and the theme with the accusative case marking. The goaltheme order is assumed to be the basic order (Hoji 1985, Takano 1998, Yatsushiro 1998, 2003. The only variation is that the theme can occur before the goal, but this is viewed simply as an instance of optional scrambling. We will give arguments that the difference between English and Japanese is only apparent.With close scrutiny, we find that the two argument structures corresponding to the DOC and the to-dative in English exist in Japanese.

Transforming growth factor-β₁ (TGF-β₁) and interleukin (IL)-10 gene expression is equivocal in normal brain and upregulated in over a dozen central and peripheral diseases/disorders. The patterns of specific expression of cytokines differ in these diseases. Published data indicate that these cytokines are produced by and act on both neurons and glial cells. Although their actions are commonly viewed as ‘anti-inflammatory’, they protect neurons and downregulate the responses of glial cells to diseases/disorders in the absence of inflammation. Their actions counterbalance the actions of elevated IL-1 and/or tumor necrosis factor-α to maintain homeostasis. Their therapeutic potential will be realized by improving our understanding of their place in neural cytokine networks.