Constitutively activated nuclear factor (NF)-kappaB is observed in a variety of neoplastic diseases and is a hallmark of the malignant Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg cells (H/RS) in Hodgkin lymphoma. Given the distinctive role of constitutive NF-kappaB for H/RS cell viability, NF-kappaB-dependent target genes were searched for by using adenoviral expression of the super-repressor IkappaBDeltaN. A s...

Although several genes (including a strong effect in the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region) and some environmental factors have been implicated to cause susceptibility to rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the etiology of the disease is not completely understood. The ability to screen the entire genome for association to complex diseases has great potential for identifying gene effects. However, the...

The North American Rheumatoid Arthritis Consortium case-control study collected case participants across the United States and control participants from New York. More than 500,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were genotyped in the sample of 2000 cases and controls. Careful adjustment for the confounding effect of population stratification must be conducted when analyzing these data; ...

Salinosporamide A (also called NPI-0052), recently identified from the marine bacterium Salinispora tropica, is a potent inhibitor of 20S proteasome and exhibits therapeutic potential against a wide variety of tumors through a poorly understood mechanism. Here we demonstrate that salinosporamide A potentiated the apoptosis induced by tumor necrosis factor (TNF), bortezomib, and thalidomide, and...

Treatment strategies blocking tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) have proven very successful in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), showing beneficial effects in approximately 50-60% of the patients. However, a significant subset of patients does not respond to anti-TNF agents, for reasons that are still unknown. The aim of this study was to validate five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP...

Embryogenesis is remarkably robust to segregating mutations and environmental variation; under a range of conditions, embryos of a given species develop into stereotypically patterned organisms. Such robustness is thought to be conferred, in part, through elements within regulatory networks that perform similar, redundant tasks. Redundant enhancers (or "shadow" enhancers), for example, can conf...

Primary effusion lymphomas (PELs) characterized by infection with the Kaposi's sarcoma herpesvirus (KSHV; also called human herpesvirus 8) depend on the expression of the viral FADD-like interleukin-1-beta-converting enzyme (FLICE)/caspase-8-inhibitory protein (vFLIP) for their survival. This effect is achieved by activation of the transcription factor nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB). Tumour ...

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a useful tool to identify important linear combination of correlated variables in multivariate analysis and has been applied to detect association between genetic variants and human complex diseases of interest. How to choose adequate number of principal components (PCs) to represent the original system in an optimal way is a key issue for PCA. Note that th...