background: alkaptonuria is a rare genetic disease leading to the accumulation of homogentesic acid in joint and ear cartilage, sclera and some other tissues causing significant morbidity in these patients. in this paper, we report three cases of alkaptonuria among the family or household members. case presentation: a 51-year-old man with mechanical low back and knee pain was referred to rheuma...

in this paper, we investigate the existence of a positive solution of fully fuzzy linear equation systems. this paper mainly to discuss a new decomposition of a nonsingular fuzzy matrix, the symmetric times triangular (st) decomposition. by this decomposition, every nonsingular fuzzy matrix can be represented as a product of a fuzzy symmetric matrix s and a fuzzy triangular matrix t.

the potential and performance of various gram-negative, gram-positive and archaeal wild type microorganisms, and bacterial mixed cultures, as well as the application of genetically engineered strains as whole-cell biocatalysts for glycerol-based polyhydroxyalkanoate production are analyzed and assessed. this encompasses the comparison of growth and polyhydroxyalkanoate accumulation kinetics, th...

Adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC) is an uncommon malignancy originating from cortex of adrenal gland. The most common pitfall in diagnosis of ACC is to distinguish it from pheochromocytoma. Here we report a 62-year-old hypertensive man with presentation of dyspnea. The laboratory data showed an increase in urine cortisol and renin with a mild increase in aldosterone, but decrease in adrenocorticot...

Background: Immune thrombocytopenia is a hematologic disorder characterized by low platelet count and variable bleeding manifestations due to immune-mediated platelet destruction and/or suppression of platelet production. This study was performed to evaluate characteristics and clinical presentations of adult patients with immune thrombocytopenia and to explore the clinical value of platelet an...

For a broader view of the role of H-2M as an accessory molecule in antigen presentation, we investigated the degree to which different MHC class II isotypes and alleles depend on H-2M to function in vivo. We generated H-2M-deficient animals expressing Ek/b or Ak molecules in addition to the Ab molecules already present in the mutant strain, and compared the ability of the different MHC class II...

We had previously found in autologous human leukocyte cultures, in which dead neutrophils phagocytosis by macrophages occur, macrophages and T CD4 lymphocytes perform a selective cell-cell interaction showing many figures of either one, two or several T- lymphocytes adhering to a central macrophage were seen. Considering that antigen presentation would be necessary for the formation of these im...