Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are a family of proteolytic enzymes that degrade the extracellular matrix and carry out key functions during brain development. Apart from a physiological role, excessive activation of MMPs in brain tissue has been postulated to represent a pathway for cell death arising from ischemia. To evaluate the possible involvement of MMPs in the perinatal brain asphyxia,...

Antigenic characterization based on serological data, such as Hemagglutination Inhibition (HI) assay, is one of the routine procedures for influenza vaccine strain selection. In many cases, it would be impossible to measure all pairwise antigenic correlations between testing antigens and reference antisera in each individual experiment. Thus, we have to combine and integrate the HI tables from ...

Each year, more than 700,000 people undergo cancer surgery in the United States. However, more than 40% of those patients develop recurrences and have a poor outcome. Traditionally, the medical community has assumed that recurrent tumors arise from selected tumor clones that are refractory to therapy. However, we found that tumor cells have few phenotypical differences after surgery. Thus, we p...

Perinatal asphyxia induces neuronal cell death and brain injury, and is often associated with irreversible neurological deficits in children. There is an urgent need to elucidate the neuronal death mechanisms occurring after neonatal hypoxia-ischemia (HI). We here investigated the selective neuronal deletion of the Atg7 (autophagy related 7) gene on neuronal cell death and brain injury in a mou...

Human infection with avian influenza A H7N9 virus was first identified in March 2013 and represents an ongoing threat to public health. There is a need to optimize serological methods for this new influenza virus. Here, we compared the sensitivity and specificity of the hemagglutinin inhibition (HI), microneutralization (MN), and Western blot (WB) assays for the detection of human antibodies ag...

Rubella virus infection in children or adults results in a self-limited, benign disease characterized by mild upper respiratory symptoms, an erythematous rash, and suboccipital lymphadenopathy. Complications of arthralgia and arthritis which may follow disappearance of the rash are most common in young women. Severe complications occur rarely. Infection of the fetus during the first trimester o...

Canine influenza virus (CIV) is an emerging pathogen that causes severe and acute respiratory disease in dogs. Canine influenza is caused by two subtypes of influenza. A virus: H3N2 and H3N8. In recent years, surveys of avian origin CIV infection in dogs have been reported worldwide. However, little is known about the prevalence of CIV in pet dogs in China. In the present study, the prevalence ...

INTRODUCTION Previous influenza pandemics had second and on occasion third waves in many countries that were at times more severe than the initial pandemic waves. OBJECTIVE This study aims to determine the seroepidemiology of successive waves of H1N1pdm09 infections in Singapore and the overall risks of infection. METHODS We performed a cohort study amongst 838 adults, with blood samples pr...

MYC and phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)-pathway deregulation are common in human prostate cancer. Through examination of 194 human prostate tumors, we observed statistically significant co-occurrence of MYC amplification and PI3K-pathway alteration, raising the possibility that these two lesions cooperate in prostate cancer progression. To investigate this, we generated bigenic mice in which b...

Canine parvovirus type-2 (CPV-2) is one of the major diarrhea-causing agents, inducing acute hemorrhagic gastroenteritis in puppies. In this study, we conducted a seroepidemiological survey of CPV-2a in stray dogs in South Korea. In total, 405 canine sera, collected between 2006 and 2007, were screened for the presence of antibodies against CPV-2a using a hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assay....