BACKGROUND Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a lethal malignancy primarily driven by activated Kras mutations and characterized by the deregulation of several genes including mucins. Previous studies on mucins have identified their significant role in both benign and malignant human diseases including PC progression and metastasis. However, the initiation of MUC expression during PC remains unknown bec...

OBJECTIVES A hallmark characteristic of SS patients is the ectopic presence of the mucins MUC5B and MUC7 in the extracellular matrix of salivary glands that have lost apical-basolateral acinar-cell polarity. This study aims to determine whether exogenous salivary mucins induce gene expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines, as well as to evaluate whether the Toll-like receptor-4 (TLR4) pathway i...

background the process of neoplastic transformation in the stomach has been reported to be associated with decreased expression of normal mucins of the gastric mucosa and denovo expression of mucins that are normally expressed in other organs. this association may be used as a means to bring new insights into biologic behavior and genetic pathways in the development of gastric cancer. there are...

A longstanding question in obstructive airway disease is whether observed changes in mucin composition and/or posttranslational glycosylation are due to genetic or to environmental factors. We tested whether the mucins secreted by second-passage primary human bronchial epithelial cell cultures derived from noncystic fibrosis (CF) or CF patients have intrinsically different specific mucin compos...

Mucociliary clearance is a major function of the airway epithelium. This important function depends both on the physicochemical properties of the airway mucus and on the activity of the cilia. The former, in turn, is dependent mainly on the quality and quantity of mucous glycoproteins or mucins, which are produced by two different cell types, namely, goblet cells of the epithelium and mucous ce...

The gel-forming mucins are large glycosylated proteins that are essential components of the mucus layers covering epithelial cells. Using novel methods of identifying mucins based on profile hidden Markov models, we have found a large number of such proteins in Metazoa, aiding in their classification and allowing evolutionary studies. Most vertebrates have 5-6 gel-forming mucin genes and the ge...

Epithelial junctions and mucins play key roles in the gastrointestinal mucosal barrier, and their alterations are associated with numerous diseases, including carcinomas. The systematic expression of adhesion molecules and mucins in normal and malignant human gastrointestinal cells was investigated in this study. In normal human gastrointestinal cells, zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1), α-catenin, β-ca...

Mucous secretions were collected from tracheas of patients undergoing minor surgery under general anaesthesia with tracheal intubation, and mucus glycoproteins were isolated by using isopycnic density-gradient centrifugation in CsCl/guanidinium chloride. 'Whole' mucins were excluded from a Sepharose CL-2B gel, whereas subunits obtained after reduction were included. Trypsin digestion of subunit...

Mouse strain-specific differences in the carbohydrate composition of intestinal mucins were hypothesized to account for strain-dependent susceptibility to Entamoeba histolytica. To test this hypothesis, intestinal mucins from susceptible and resistant inbred strains of mice were analyzed for their O-glycan content and for their ability to inhibit amoebic adherence to (GalNAc)12-27-HSA neo-glyco...

Although mucins have been found to be useful in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, the carbohydrate and peptide structures of pancreatic mucins are still not well characterized. Monoclonal antibodies were produced using mucins purified from xenografts of a human pancreatic cancer cell line as the immunogen. One of these, Ia3, reacted with almost all pancreatic, gastric, and colorectal carcinom...