Eosinophil chemotactic factor (ECF) was detected in the culture supernatant of isolated intact egg granulomas from the livers of Schistosoma japonicum-infected mice. This factor had an apparent molecular weight of 15,000 by high-pressure liquid chromatography with an SW3000 column and bound to concanavalin A-Sepharose 4B. When cells obtained by enzymatic digestion of isolated granulomas were cu...

Delivery of valproic acid (VPA) to the human brain is relatively inefficient as reflected by a low brain-to-unbound plasma concentration ratio (< or =0.5) at steady state. Previous pharmacokinetic studies suggested that the unfavorable brain-to-plasma gradient is maintained by coupled efflux transport processes at both the brain parenchymal cells and blood-brain barrier (BBB); one or both of th...

Pseudomonas syringae pv. syringae B728a, a bacterial pathogen of bean, utilizes large surface populations and extracellular signaling to initiate a fundamental change from an epiphytic to a pathogenic lifestyle. Extracytoplasmic function (ECF) sigma (σ) factors serve as important regulatory factors in responding to various environmental signals. Bioinformatic analysis of the B728a genome reveal...

Introduction: Enterocutaneous fistula (ECF) represents a challenging clinical condition in surgery. Two cases of ECF are presented that were successfully treated with MatriStem, a porcine urinary bladder matrix xenograft application. Case Series: The cases were treated with a procedure involving curettage of the tract, followed by injection of a MatriStem slurry, and insertion of a rolled Matri...

Constitutive activation of canonical WNT-TCF signaling is implicated in multiple diseases, including intestine and lung cancers, but there are no WNT-TCF antagonists in clinical use. We have performed a repositioning screen for WNT-TCF response blockers aiming to recapitulate the genetic blockade afforded by dominant-negative TCF. We report that Ivermectin inhibits the expression of WNT-TCF tar...

Specific recognition of DNA by transcription factors is essential for precise gene regulation. In Wingless (Wg) signaling in Drosophila, target gene regulation is controlled by T cell factor (TCF), which binds to specific DNA sequences through a high mobility group (HMG) domain. However, there is considerable variability in TCF binding sites, raising the possibility that they are not sufficient...

TCF transcription factors are mediators of the WNT signaling pathway and are antagonized by the transforming growth factor beta signaling pathway. Here human TCF-3 has been cloned and characterized. Differential expression analyses of TCF genes in gastric cancer revealed that TCF-1 was expressed in most cases of primary gastric cancer at almost the same level as in normal gastric mucosa and tha...

-Catenin and T cell factor (Tcf) are distal components of the highly conserved Wnt pathway that govern cell fate and proliferation in lower organisms. Thus, we hypothesized that the regulation of -catenin and Tcf played a critical role in vascular remodeling. The first objective was to define -catenin expression in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) after balloon injury. Indeed, -catenin mRNA...

Energy coupling factor (ECF) proteins are ATP-binding cassette transporters involved in the import of micronutrients in prokaryotes. They consist of two nucleotide-binding subunits and the integral membrane subunit EcfT, which together form the ECF module and a second integral membrane subunit that captures the substrate (the S component). Different S components, unrelated in sequence and speci...

When human alveolar macrophages (AM) lavaged from healthy donors were incubated in medium with or without lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or muramyl dipeptide, they released a factor(s) responsible for tumor cell killing. The activity of the tumor cytolytic factor(s), called TCF, was determined by radioactive release assay. Human AM released variable amounts of TCF into the culture medium without any ...