Mucosal surfaces function as selectively permeable barriers between the host and the outside world. Given their close proximity to microbial Ags, mucosal surfaces have evolved sophisticated mechanisms for maintaining homeostasis and preventing excessive acute inflammatory reactions. The role attributed to epithelial cells was historically limited to serving as a selective barrier; in recent yea...

Tight Junctions are the most apical element of the junctional complex in epithelial and endothelial cells. Tight Junctions form a barrier to paracellular movement of substances separating the apical and basolateral fluid compartments on opposite sides of the epithelial cell layer. The Claudin family are Tight Junction proteins expressed in both endothelial and epithelial cells. They participate...

Arthropod-borne viruses were not previously believed to cause discernible pathologic changes in their natural mosquito vectors. We report cytopathologic lesions in the midgut of the mosquito, Culiseta melanura, 2 to 5 days after oral infection with eastern equine encephalomyelitis virus. Sloughing of densely staining, heavily infected epithelial cells into the midgut lumen was observed by light...

Claudins are tetraspan transmembrane tight-junction proteins that regulate epithelial barriers. In the distal airspaces of the lung, alveolar epithelial tight junctions are crucial to regulate airspace fluid. Chronic alcohol abuse weakens alveolar tight junctions, priming the lung for acute respiratory distress syndrome, a frequently lethal condition caused by airspace flooding. Here we demonst...

Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic phenomenon causing parent-of-origin specific differential expression of maternally and paternally inherited alleles. While many imprinted genes have been identified in plants, the functional roles of most of them are unknown. In this study, we systematically examine the functional requirement of paternally expressed imprinted genes (PEGs) during seed developm...

Candida is a leading cause of late-onset sepsis in premature infants and is thought to invade the host via immature or damaged epithelial barriers. We previously showed that the hyphal form of Candida albicans invades and causes damage to premature intestinal epithelial cells (pIECs), whereas the non-hyphal Candida parapsilosis, also a fungal pathogen of neonates, has less invasion and damage a...

background: metastasis is one the most leading cause of death from cancer. the chemokine receptor of cxcr4 has an important role in cell migration and cancer metastasis. additionally, metastasis is always associated with the process of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (emt). in this study the correlation between expression of cxcr4 and emt-tfs has been examined. methods: the expression of cxcr...

objective: the goal of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of intraperitoneal (jp) cisplatin as consolidation treatment, in epithelial ovarian cancer patients with pathologically negative surgical reassessment, following first-line platinum-based chemotherapy. methods: this study included 22 patients with figo stage (iic- iv) epithelial ovarian cancer (eoc) which had no evidence of disease a...