Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, motor neuron disease and Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by loss of specific cells within certain regions of the brain. One of the most compelling questions is to determine why specific cell populations are vulnerable to neurodegeneration. We addressed this question by studying global gene expression changes using an animal model of ...

An increase in mast cell (MC) numbers in hemopoietic tissues may be associated with (a) primary neoplastic MC disease (mastocytosis); (b) non-mast cell lineage myelogenous disorders (myelodysplastic or myeloproliferative syndromes and myeloid leukemias); or (c) reactive, i.e. non-clonal states (MC hyperplasia and reactive mastocytosis). However, the histologic discrimination between hyperplasti...

† We acknowledge the useful comments from Nerissa Brown, Woo-Jin Chan, Jeff Coulton, Neil Fargher, Sarah McVay, Gil Sadka, Andreas Simon and participants at the AFAANZ Annual Conference in 2005. This work was started by Andrew Lynch as part of his honour’s thesis at the University of Melbourne, and completed while Asher Curtis and Julian Yeo were PhD students at the University of New South Wale...

David A. Holway,1 Lori Lach,2 Andrew V. Suarez,3 Neil D. Tsutsui,4 and Ted J. Case1 1Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093; email: [email protected], [email protected] 2Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853; email: [email protected] 3Dep...

Mast cells (MC) are potent innate immune cells that accumulate in chronically inflamed tissues. MC express the IL-33 receptor IL-1 receptor-related protein ST2 at high level, and this IL-1 family cytokine both activates MC directly and primes them to respond to other proinflammatory signals. Whether IL-33 and ST2 play a role in MC survival remains to be defined. In skin-derived human MC, we fou...

BACKGROUND Two cell specific neutral proteases, tryptase and chymase, are produced by human mast cells (MC). Tryptase is constitutively expressed by all MC, whereas chymase is found only in an MC subset. Very little is known about chymase expression in MC proliferative disorders (mastocytosis). AIMS AND METHODS Routinely processed, formalin fixed, and paraffin wax embedded bone marrow trephin...

Microcystins (MC), cyanobacterial peptide hepatotoxins, comprise more than 100 different variants. They are rather polar molecules but some variants contain hydrophobic amino acid residues in the highly variable parts of the molecule. In MC-LF and MC-LW, the more hydrophobic phenylalanine (F) and tryptophan (W), respectively, have replaced arginine (R) in MC-LR. Depending on the structure, micr...

BACKGROUND Self-reported male circumcision (MC) status is widely used to estimate community prevalence of circumcision, although its accuracy varies in different settings depending on the extent of misreporting. Despite this challenge, self-reported MC status remains essential because it is the most feasible method of collecting MC status data in community surveys. Therefore, its accuracy is an...