premature chromosome condensation (pcc) appears to have a possible utility for biological dosimetry purposes. the pcc technique may be adapted for cases of suspicion of overexposure where sampling is performed at least one day after an accident. for this purpose, human blood samples were exposed in vitro to 60co up to 10 gy and the pcc technique was performed immediately after irradiation. anal...

Spinocerebellar ataxia type-3 (SCA3) is among the most common dominantly inherited ataxias, and is one of nine devastating human neurodegenerative diseases caused by the expansion of a CAG repeat encoding glutamine within the gene. The polyglutamine domain confers toxicity on the protein Ataxin-3 leading to neuronal dysfunction and loss. Although modifiers of polyglutamine toxicity have been id...

Chk2 is a well characterized protein kinase with key roles in the DNA damage response. Chk2 is activated by phosphorylation following DNA damage, and relays that signal to various substrate proteins to induce cell cycle arrest, DNA repair, and apoptosis. In order to identify novel components of the Chk2 signaling pathway in Drosophila, we screened 2,240 EP misexpression lines for dominant modif...

Biotherapy became recognized as the fourth modality of cancer treatment applied after surgical treatment, radiotherapy and chemotherapy since the Biological Response Modifier (BRM) theory was proposed by Dr. Oldham in the 1980s (1). Cancer biotherapy is a therapeutic method that could prohibit the growth of tumors through mobilizing the host's immune system or via the effect of biological agent...

The article deals with the characteristics of noun phrases functioning in pre-position. Pre-noun modifiers, or attributive modifiers, are among the high-capacity structures in the contemporary English language, as they enable to devoid of prepositions and to describe objects in a laconic way. The goal of this research was to analyze the way scholars interpret this linguistic structure today, as...

Parasitic worms are able to survive in their mammalian host for many years due to their ability to manipulate the immune response by secreting immunomodulatory products. It is increasingly clear that, reflecting the anti-inflammatory actions of such worm-derived immunomodulators, there is an inverse correlation between helminth infection and autoimmune diseases in the developing world. As the d...

Various natural polysaccharides are capable of activating the immune system and therefore can be employed as biological response modifiers in anti-tumor therapy. We previously found a homogenous polysaccharide from the mycelium of marine fungus Phoma herbarum YS4108, named YCP, exhibiting strong in vivo antitumor ability via enhancement of the host immune responses. To further elucidate the rol...

BACKGROUND About half of people with Down syndrome (DS) exhibit some form of congenital heart disease (CHD); however, trisomy for human chromosome 21 (Hsa21) alone is insufficient to cause CHD, as half of all people with DS have a normal heart, suggesting that genetic modifiers interact with dosage-sensitive gene(s) on Hsa21 to result in CHD. We hypothesize that a threshold exists in both DS an...