How amphetamine affects the neuroglia in living brains is not well understood. In an effort to elucidate this effect, we investigated neuroglia in response to amphetamine exposure using antisense (AS) or sense (S) phosphorothioate-modified oligodeoxynucleotide (sODN) sequences that correspond to glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) mRNA (AS-gfap or S-gfap, respectively) expression. The contro...

The glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) is a type III intermediate filament (IF) that highly expressed in astrocytes, neural stem cells, and gliomas. Gliomas are heterogeneous group of primary brain tumors arise from glia cells or rely on accurate diagnosis for prognosis treatment strategies. GFAP differentially between glioma subtypes and, therefore, often used as diagnostic marker. However...

Intermediate filament (IF) proteins constitute an extremely large multigene family of developmentally and tissue-regulated cytoskeleton proteins abundant in most vertebrate cell types. Astrocyte precursors of the CNS usually express vimentin as the major IF. Astrocyte maturation is followed by a switch between vimentin and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) expression, with the latter being...

BACKGROUND/AIMS In patients with gliomatosis cerebri (GC), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) positive cells invade the entire brain, particularly the white matter. Because the nosological definition and histogenesis of GC remain controversial, the morphology and immunohistochemical staining patterns of neoplastic GC cells were compared with those of other gliomas. METHODS An immunohistoc...

Pancreatic fibrosis develops as the results of the activity of myofibroblasts capable of producing collagens. The myofibroblasts derive from pancreatic interstitial cells, including pancreatic stellate cells (PSCs), which can express glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP). First, we investigated the expression patterns of vimentin, desmin, α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA), Thy-1 and GFAP in the de...

We have found glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), the major component of astrocyte intermediate filaments, to be expressed in cell lines of the RT4 peripheral neurotumor family. The RT4 family is a "stem-cell-like" cell line, RT4-AC, that spontaneously undergoes differentiation in culture to three derivative cell types. This process, termed cell-type conversion, results in a segregation amo...

Signaling mechanisms that regulate astrocyte reactivity and scar formation after spinal cord injury (SCI) are not well defined. We used the Cre recombinase (Cre)-loxP system under regulation of the mouse glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) promoter to conditionally delete the cytokine and growth factor signal transducer, signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3), from astroc...

Oxidative injury and stress responses are common features of many neurodegenerative diseases. To assess oxidative stress responses in frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), we identified increased 4-hydroxynonenal (HNE) adducts using gel electrophoresis and Western blotting in frontal cortex samples in 6 of 6 cases of FTLD with the P301L mutation in the tau gene (FTLD-tau), in 3 of 10 cases ...

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of diabetic hyperglycemia on astrocyte function, estimated by means of glial fibrillary acidic protein – GFAP – immunohistochemical expression. Materials and methods: Adult male rats received a single intravenous injection of streptozotocin (50 mg/kg) and were submitted 10 days later to a single injection of 10 microlitres 0.1% EB solu...

In the developing mouse brain, once the generation of neurons is mostly completed during the prenatal period, precisely coordinated signals act on competent neural precursors to direct their differentiation into astrocytes, which occurs mostly after birth. Among these signals, those provided by neurotrophic cytokines and bone morphogenetic proteins appear to have a key role in triggering the ne...