BACKGROUND Retinoic acid (RA) signaling has been identified as a key driver in male and female gamete development. The presence of RA is a critical step in the initiation of meiosis and is required for the production of competent oocytes from primordial germ cells. Meiosis has been identified as a difficult biological process to recapitulate in vitro, when differentiating stem cells to germ cel...

OBJECTIVES To investigate whether anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies (ASCA), a marker for Crohn's disease (CD), are present in spondyloarthropathies (SpA) and in the subgroups ankylosing spondylitis (AS), undifferentiated SpA (uSpA), and psoriatic arthritis (PsA), in comparison with healthy and inflammatory controls (patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)). METHODS ASCA IgA and IgG lev...

Introduction: Gaseous air pollutants can cause oxidative stress, which can lead to lung damage by inducing inflammation. Polymorphisms in the glutathione S-transferase (GST) gene are involved in the pathogenesis of many diseases, including lung disease. Two glutathione S-transferase Mu 1 (GSTM1) and glutathione S-transferase theta 1 (GSTT1) genes belong to this family, in which deletions occur ...

We developed a simple method of generating markerless deletions in the Escherichia coli chromosome. The method consists of two recombination events stimulated by lambda Red recombinase. The first recombination replaced a target region with a marker cassette and the second then eliminated the marker cassette. The marker cassette included an antibiotic resistant gene and a negative selection mark...

CREB [CRE (cAMP-response element)-binding protein] is an important transcription factor that is differentially regulated in cells of various types. We recently reported that RA (retinoic acid) rapidly activates CREB without using RARs (RA receptors) or RXRs (retinoid X receptors) in NHTBE cells (normal human tracheobronchial epithelial cells). However, little is known about the role of RA in th...

BACKGROUND Fibromyalgia (FM) is defined as a widely distributed pain. While many rheumatologists and pain physicians have considered it to be a pain disorder, psychiatry, psychology, and general medicine have deemed it to be a syndrome (FMS) or psychosomatic disorder. The lack of concrete structural and/or pathological evidence has made patients suffer prejudice that FMS is a medically unexplai...

The present article aims to provide a synchronic study of the inflectional or morpho-syntactic categories of noun in Sistani dialect. These categories comprise person, number, gender or noun class, definiteness, case, and possession. Linguistic data was collected via recording free speech, and interviewing with 30 (15 females, 15 males) illiterate Sistani language consultants of age 40–102 year...

Fcγ receptors are a family of cell-surface receptors that are expressed by a host of different innate and adaptive immune cells, and mediate inflammatory responses by binding the Fc portion of immunoglobulin G. In humans, five low-affinity receptors are encoded by the genes FCGR2A, FCGR2B, FCGR2C, FCGR3A, and FCGR3B, which are located in an 82.5-kb segmental tandem duplication on chromosome 1q2...

We report a system for the efficient removal of a marker flanked by two loxP sites in Streptomyces coelicolor, using a derivative of the temperate phage phiC31 that expresses Cre recombinase during a transient infection. As the test case for this recombinant phage (called Cre-phage), we present the construction of an in-frame deletion of a gene, pglW, required for phage growth limitation or Pgl...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the most common systemic inflammatory autoimmune disease of unknown etiology. The early in diagnosis of RA is crucial. To facilitate diagnosis during the early stages of RA, when often not all clinical symptoms are manifest, a good serological marker is needed. Among serological markers are rheumatoid factor (RF), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) C-reactive prot...