1 reported that 2 weeks of warfarin treatment in young rats caused massive focal calcification of the artery media. It had been known for years that warfarin could induce mineral deposition in the arteries of rodents, 2 and the phenomenon was so robust that warfarin was often used as an experimental model for vascular calcification, but the mechanism was unknown. In this issue, Tantisattamo et ...

Anoxic survival requires the matching of cardiac ATP supply (i.e. maximum glycolytic potential, MGP) and demand (i.e. cardiac power output, PO). We examined the idea that the previously observed in vivo downregulation of cardiac function during exposure to severe hypoxia in tilapia (Oreochromis hybrid) represents a physiological strategy to reduce routine PO to within the heart's MGP. The MGP o...

Dental caries is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in the United States, affecting 92% of adults aged 20-64 years. Scaffold-based tissue engineering represents a promising strategy to replace damaged dental structures and restore their biological functions. Current single-component scaffolding materials used for dental tissue regeneration, however, cannot provide the proper microenviro...

Drug repositioning, discovering new indications for existing drugs, is known to solve the bottleneck of drug discovery and development. To support a task many in silico methods have been proposed predicting drug-disease associations. A meta-path based approach, which extracts network-based information through paths from disease, can produce comparable performance with less required when compare...

Three different methodologies, reduction of litmus milk (LM) and acidification of arabinose (ARA), acidification of methyl-alpha-D-glucopyranoside (MGP), and rapid motility (RM), for differentiating isolates of Enterococcus casseliflavus and Enterococcus gallinarum (intrinsically vancomycin-resistant enterococci [IVRE]) from Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium were evaluated. All 33 ...

Vascular calcification is a major risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. In atherosclerotic lesions, calcification is mainly found in the neointima of atheromatous plaques and has been shown to positively correlate with the plaque burden and the risk of myocardial infarction. Calcification of atherosclerotic plaques has been clearly shown to result from osteoblastic differentia...

OBJECTIVE The present study was conducted to improve our knowledge of intervertebral disc (IVD) cell biology by comparing the phenotype of nucleus pulposus (NP) and annulus fibrosus (AF) cells with that of articular chondrocytes (ACs). METHODS Rabbit cells from NP and AF were isolated and their phenotype was compared with that of AC by real-time PCR analysis of type I (COL1A1), II (COL2A1) an...

Transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus (TGEV) is a porcine pathogen causing enteric infections that are lethal for suckling piglets. The enterotropism of TGEV is connected with the sialic acid binding activity of the viral surface protein S. Here we show that, among porcine intestinal brush border membrane proteins, TGEV recognizes a mucin-type glycoprotein designated MGP in a sialic acid-de...

In this paper, we develop a multilevel global placement algorithm (MGP) integrated with fast incremental global routing for directly updating and optimizing congestion cost during physical hierarchy generation. Fast global routing is achieved using a fast two-bend routing and incremental A-tree algorithm. The routing congestion is modeled by the wire usage estimated by the fast global router. A...

BACKGROUND A reduced heparan sulphate (HS) expression in the glomerular basement membrane of patients with overt diabetic nephropathy is associated with an increased glomerular heparanase expression. We investigated the possible association of urinary heparanase activity with the development of proteinuria in patients with Type 1 diabetes (T1D), Type 2 diabetes (T2D), or membranous glomerulopat...