BACKGROUND Previous studies suggest that periconceptional maternal occupational exposure to solvents and pesticides increase the risk of oral clefts in the offspring. Less is known about the effect of occupational exposure to metals, dust, and gases and fumes on development of oral clefts. METHODS This case-malformed control study used data from a population-based birth defects registry (Euro...

BACKGROUND Multivitamin supplementation in pregnant women may reduce the risks of cardiovascular defects, oral clefts, and urinary tract defects in their infants. We evaluated whether the folic acid component of multivitamins is responsible for the reduction in risk by examining the associations between maternal use of folic acid antagonists and these congenital malformations. METHODS We comp...

The information structure of English cleft sentences is discussed. A cleft sentence divides a proposition into two parts, which are interpreted as an exhaustive focus and a pragmatic presupposition. These two semantic components can be flexibly mapped onto the information structure categories of topic and comment to arrive at comment-topic (‘stressed focus’) clefts and topic-comment (‘informati...

The homodimeric Escherichia coli beta sliding clamp contains two hydrophobic clefts with which proteins involved in DNA replication, repair and damage tolerance interact. Deletion of the C-terminal five residues of beta (beta(C)) disrupted both clefts, severely impairing interactions of the clamp with the DnaX clamp loader, as well as the replicative DNA polymerase, Pol III. In order to determi...

Background Oral clefts are among the common congenital birth defects with a broad phenotypic gamut. Since the epidermal ridges of the fingers and palms as well as the facial structures like lip, alveolus, and palate are formed from the same embryonic tissues during the same embryonic period, the genetic and environmental factors responsible for causing cleft lip and palate might also affect der...

Clefts that occur in children are a special topic. Avoiding risk factors, and also an early diagnosis of cleft possibility can result in minimizing or avoiding them. If on the other hand when clefts occur they require a long-term, multistage specialized treatment. Etiology of clefts seems to be related to many factors. Factors such as genetic, environmental, geographic and even race factors are...

BACKGROUND Plasmodium, the causative agent of malaria, exports many proteins to the surface of the infected red blood cell (iRBC) in order to modify it toward a structure more suitable for parasite development and survival. One such exported protein, SURFIN4.2, from the parasite of human malignant malaria, P. falciparum, was identified in the trypsin-cleaved protein fraction from the iRBC surfa...

BACKGROUND Gain-of-function mutations in the voltage-gated sodium channel (Nav1.5) are associated with the long-QT-3 (LQT3) syndrome. Nav1.5 is densely expressed at the intercalated disk, and narrow intercellular separation can modulate cell-to-cell coupling via extracellular electric fields and depletion of local sodium ion nanodomains. Models predict that significantly decreasing intercellula...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the clinical manifestations and surgical prognoses after direct cyclopexy in patients with traumatic cyclodialysis according to the cleft extent as determined by ultrasound biomicroscopy (UBM). METHODS A detailed ophthalmologic examination, which included gonioscopy and UBM, was performed before and after direct cyclopexy in 32 eyes of 31 patients with traumatic cycl...