Backgrounds: A straight-forward way to identify whether a drug or environmental chemical can be harmful to unborn baby is to evaluate its effect on laboratory animals. All invivo methods need large number of animal and are therefore time consuming and expensive. However, the thousands of chemicals in need of testing, to reduce the spending of live animals, an assortment of in vitro assays has ...

Spore-derived mycobionts of the lichen Haematomma sp. were cultivated on malt-yeast extract medium supplemented with 10% sucrose to produce a new pyranonaphthoquinone, 4, as well as two known compounds (-)-usnic acid (2) and 5-deoxy-7-methylbostrycoidin (3). The structure of 4 was determined by spectroscopic methods. The inhibitory activities of 3, 4, and 6–8 against mammalian DNA polymerases (...

Here we report the construction, antigenicity and initial immunogenicity testing of DNA and modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA) vaccines expressing virus-like particles (VLPs) displaying sequential clade C Envelopes (Envs) that co-evolved with the elicitation of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) to the CD4 binding site (CD4bs) in HIV-infected individual CH0505. The VLP-displayed Envs showed re...

SCID mice are resistant to intraperitoneal infection with 10(3) and 10(4) intracerebral ID50 units of ME7 scrapie agent whereas they develop disease after intracerebral challenge. However, higher doses introduced, by intraperitoneal or subcutaneous routes, produce disease. Immunocompetent mice of the same strain (CB20) developed scrapie following either intracerebral or intraperitoneal infectio...

Substance P (SP) is an important neurotransmitter that mediates various gut functions; however, its precise pathophysiological role remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the effect of SP on colonic function and the effect of TAK-637 [(aR,9R)-7-[3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)benzyl]-8,9,10,11-tetrahydro-9-methyl-5-(4-methylphenyl)-7H-[1,4]diazocino[2,1-g][1,7]naphthyridine-6,13-dione] a new ...

This study has investigated the role of protein kinase C (PKC) activation in IgG-mediated phagocytosis by human monocytes. Incubation of monocytes with IgG-opsonized targets increased membrane-associated PKC approximately 2-fold. Kinetic studies showed that the translocation of PKC to membrane occurred before significant ingestion took place. The pharmacologic PKC inhibitor H7 inhibited IgG-dep...

Type beta transforming growth factor (TGF beta) has been shown to be both a positive and negative regulator of cellular proliferation and differentiation. The effects of TGF beta also are cell-type specific and appear to be modulated by other growth factors. In the present study, we examined the potential of TGF beta for control of myogenic differentiation. In mouse C-2 myoblasts, TGF beta inhi...

The phosphorylation of human C3a (hC3a, anaphylatoxin) by two distinct protein kinases (PKA and CK-I) and the effect of cholesterol-3-sulfate (CH-3S) on this phosphorylation were biochemically investigated in vitro. It was found that (i) hC3a functions as a phosphate acceptor for PKA and CK-I, but not for CK-II; (ii) the CK-I-mediated phosphorylation of hC3a requires the presence of 3 microM CH...