The adapter molecule Shc has been implicated in specific steps of metastasis. In the current study, we show that the expression and activation of the p66 Shc isoform increased in a highly metastatic variant (F-11) of the human breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231 compared to the parent cell line, whereas the p46 and p52 Shc isoforms were unchanged. Despite reports that p66 Shc can negatively regu...

The in vivo signal transduction pathway, responsible for hypertension-induced glomerular injury, remains to be clarified. In this study, the effect of angiotensin II (Ang II)-induced hypertension was examined on glomerular mitogen activated protein kinases (MAPK), including extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) and c-jun NH2-terminal kinase (JNK), and on glomerular transcription factors a...

Bootstrap percolation, one of the simplest cellular automata, can be seen as a model of the spread of infection. In r-neighbour bootstrap percolation on a graph G we assign a state, infected or healthy, to every vertex of G and then update these states in successive rounds, according to the following simple local update rule: infected vertices of G remain infected forever and a healthy vertex b...

Fetal overgrowth is common in obese women and is associated with perinatal complications and increased risk for the child to develop metabolic syndrome later in life. Placental nutrient transport capacity has been reported to be increased in obese women giving birth to large infants; however, the underlying mechanisms are not well established. Obesity in pregnancy is characterized by elevated m...

In this study, we cloned and sequenced cDNA encoding the chicken p46 polypeptide, RbAp46. The cDNA encoding a protein consists of 424 amino acids is a member of the WD protein family, with seven WD repeat motifs, and exhibits 90.3% identity to RbAp48, and 94.3% identity to the human RbAp46. The RbAp46 fusion protein were synthesized by in vitro translation system and in Escherichia coli under i...

We have previously shown that murine ELM erythroleukemia cells can only be grown in vitro in the presence of a stromal feeder layer, or alternatively stem cell factor (SCF), without which they differentiate. When grown in the presence of SCF, ELM cells can still differentiate in response to erythropoietin (Epo), but growth on stroma prevents this. We previously isolated a stroma-independent ELM...

Chromatin assembly factor 1 (CAF-1) assembles nucleosomes in a replication-dependent manner. The small subunit of CAF-1 (p48) is a member of a highly conserved subfamily of WD-repeat proteins. There are at least two members of this subfamily in both human (p46 and p48) and yeast cells (Hat2p, a subunit of the B-type H4 acetyltransferase, and Msi1p). Human p48 can bind to histone H4 in the absen...

Inflammation, characterized by the presence of proinflammatory chemokines and neutrophils, is a hallmark of early airway disease in infants with cystic fibrosis (CF), although the underlying mechanisms remain poorly defined. In this study, we evaluated the role of NaCl and the ensuing hyperosmolar effect on tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha signaling and apoptosis in macrophages. Incubation of ...

Optic neuritis is commonly associated with diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, infections, taking special drugs, etc. but recently we have observed a patient that presented retro bulbar optic neuritis as a manifestation of antiphospholipid syndrome. A 35 y/o young woman with the history of chickenpox admitted to the Qhaem hospital (Mashhad, Iran) with the c/o progressive pain and blurred visio...