The dialyzer housing structure should be designed in such a way that high dialysis performance is achieved. To achieve high dialysis performance, the flow of the dialysis fluid and blood should be uniform, without channeling and dead spaces. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of fiber packing density on the flow of dialysis fluid and blood, and on the dialysis performance of a hollow-fiber dialyzer at defined flow rates for blood (Q (B) = 200 mL/min), dialysis fluid (Q (D) = 500 mL/min), and filtrate (Q (F) = 0 mL/min). We measured Q (D), Q (B), and solute clearance for 3 test dialyzers with dialyzer housing different diameters. To evaluate the flow of dialysis fluid and blood, we measured the residence time of the dialysis fluid and blood in the test dialyzers by use of the pulse-response method. We also measured the clearances of urea, creatinine, vitamin B(12), and lysozyme to evaluate the dialysis performance of the test dialyzers. At packing densities ranging from 48 to 67%, higher packing densities and lower housing diameters of the dialyzer resulted in higher dialysis performance because the dialysis fluid and blood entered the hollow-fiber bundle smoothly and, hence, increased contact area between the dialysis fluid and the blood led to better dialysis performance.

Plastid transformation methods have been developed for 20 plant species. However, only a few plant species, such as tobacco and lettuce, have been used in applied studies because transformation efficiencies are extremely low in other species. Plastid transformation has been mainly performed by particle bombardment using 0.6-µm gold particles as microcarriers of the transformation vector. Because the target materials in some plant species are undeveloped proplastids rather than fully developed chloroplasts, optimizing microcarrier size for the target size is a major consideration. In this study, we evaluated the availability of gold particles (0.07, 0.08, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 µm) that were smaller than those used for plastid transformation in previous studies. We obtained stable plastid transformants of tobacco with sufficient efficiency using all the tested small gold particles as the same level as 0.6-µm gold particles, even the smallest (0.07 µm). The average number of transformants obtained with 0.3-µm particles (9.3±4.6 per plate) was the highest among the tested gold particles. Because small gold particles were revealed to be sufficient for plastid transformation in a model tobacco plant, it is suggested that choosing appropriate small-sized gold particles which have never been used before will improve plastid transformation in many plant species.

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