Lens development provides a good model system for studying cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying embryonic induction and morphogenesis. Members of the large Maf family of transcription factors, L-Maf and c-Maf, have been shown to play key roles in chick and mouse lens development. Here we report identification of two Xenopus maf genes, XmafB and XL-maf, which exhibit unique temporal and ...

Serum vitamin D3-binding protein (Gc protein) is the precursor for the principal macrophage activating factor (MAF). The MAF precursor activity of serum Gc protein of breast cancer patients was lost or reduced because Gc protein was deglycosylated by serum a-N-acetylgalactosaminidase (Nagalase) secreted from cancerous cells. Patient serum Nagalase activity is proportional to tumor burden. The d...

The frequencies of precursors of C57BL/6 T lymphocytes that respond to DBA/2 alloantigens by secreting the lymphokines interleukin 2 (IL-2), macrophage-activating factor (MAF), and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) have been directly compared with cytolytic T lymphocyte precursor (CTL-P) frequencies in limiting dilution microcultures established from spleen cells positiv...

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a currently incurable neoplasm of terminally differentiated B cells. The translocation and/or overexpression of c-MAF have been observed in human MM. Although c-MAF might function as an oncogene in human MM, there has been no report thus far describing the direct induction of MM by c-MAF overexpression in vivo. In this study, we have generated transgenic (TG) mice that ...

c-Maf, which is one of the large Maf transcription factors, can bind to Maf recognition element (MARE) and activates transcription of target genes. Although c-Maf is expressed in macrophages and directly regulates the expression of interleukin-10, detailed information regarding its function in the null mutant phenotype of tissue macrophages remain unknown. In this study, we demonstrated that c-...

The Maximum Agreement Forest (Maf) problem is a well-studied problem in evolutionary biology, which asks for a largest common subforest of a given collection of phylogenetic trees with identical leaf label-set. However, the previous work about the Maf problem are mainly on two binary phylogenetic trees or two general (i.e., binary and non-binary) phylogenetic trees. In this paper, we study the ...

Macrophages play a crucial role in the defense against tumors and parasites. Activation of tumoricidal and microbicidal effector mechanisms requires stimulation of macrophages with macrophage-activating factors (MAF). One such MAF is interferon gamma (IFN-gamma). In some assays, substantial activity of IFN-gamma on murine macrophages, however, is only observed in synergy with lipopolysaccharide...

Alterations of phospholipid and arachidonic acid metabolism were studied by treatment of guinea-pig peritoneal-exudate macrophages with chemotactic peptide, formylmethionyl-leucylphenylalanine (fMet-Leu-Phe) and macrophage activation factor (MAF). The chemotactic peptide caused a rapid rearrangement in inositol phospholipids, including a breakdown of polyphosphoinositides within 30s, followed b...

This paper describes the multivariate alteration detection (MAD) transformation which is based on the established canonical correlation analysis. It also proposes post-processing of the change detected by the MAD variates by means of maximum autocorrelation factor (MAF) analysis. As opposed to most other multivariate change detection schemes the MAD and the combined MAF/MAD transformations are ...