Recent data suggest that mast cells (MC) are involved in the regulation of leukocyte accumulation in inflammatory reactions. In this study, expression of leukocyte-chemotactic peptides (chemokines) in purified human lung MC (n = 16) and a human mast cell line, HMC-1, was analyzed. Northern blotting and reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) showed baseline expression of monocy...

Lipid abnormalities and dysregulation of the plasminogen activator (PA)/plasmin system may be involved in the development of glomerulosclerosis. We investigated the effects of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) on PA inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), urokinase-type PA (uPA), and tissue-type PA (tPA) in relationship to protein kinase C (PKC) in cultured human mesangial cells (HMC). LDL (200 microg/ml) induced two...

Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), one of the most promising next-generation biomarkers in clinical nephrology, has received extensive attention. However, the basic role of its receptor (NGALR) remains unclear. Here, we have assessed the expression pattern of NGALR in injured glomeruli and explored the possible mechanism of the NGALR involvement in inflammation in human mesangia...

Nerve growth factor (NGF) can influence mast cell development and function in murine rodents by interacting with its receptors on mast cells. We now report the identification of mRNA transcripts of full-length tyrosine kinase-containing trkA, trkB, and trkC neurotrophin receptor genes in HMC-1 human mast cell leukemia cells. Although HMC-1 cells lacked p75 mRNA, they expressed transcripts for t...

The effect of high and low molecular weight chitosans (HMC; 1000 kDa, LMC; 30 kDa) on oxidative stress and hypercholesterolemia was investigated using male 6-week-old Wistar Kyoto rats as a normal model (Normal-rats) and spontaneously hypertensive rat/ND mcr-cp (SHP/ND) as a metabolic syndrome model (MS-rats), respectively. In Normal-rats, the ingestion of both chitosans over a 4 week period re...

Both cytosine-Ag-cytosine interactions and cytosine modifications in a DNA duplex have attracted great interest for research. Cytosine (C) modifications such as methylcytosine (mC) and hydroxymethylcytosine (hmC) are associated with tumorigenesis. However, a method for directly discriminating C, mC and hmC bases without labeling, modification and amplification is still missing. Additionally, th...

We propose Kernel Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (KMC), a gradient-free adaptive MCMC algorithm based on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). On target densities where classical HMC is not an option due to intractable gradients, KMC adaptively learns the target’s gradient structure by fitting an exponential family model in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. Computational costs are reduced by two novel effi...