In the adult thymus, the development of self-tolerant thymocytes requires interactions with thymic epithelial cells (TECs). Although both cortical and medullary TECs (cTECs/mTECs) are known to arise from common bipotent TEC progenitors, the phenotype of these progenitors and the timing of the emergence of these distinct lineages remain unclear. Here, we have investigated the phenotype and devel...

A common feature seen in acute infections is a severe atrophy of the thymus. This occurs in the murine model of acute Chagas disease. Moreover, in thymuses from Trypanosoma cruzi acutely infected mice, thymocytes exhibit an increase in the density of fibronectin and laminin integrin-type receptors, with an increase in migratory response ex vivo. Thymic epithelial cells (TEC) play a major role i...

[1] The first documented, empirical comparisons are provided of four methods to retrieve total electron content (TEC) that use broadband, impulsive events detected by satellite in the lower very high frequency range (20–150 MHz). The four TEC retrieval methods are the quasi‐longitudinal approximation (i.e., Taylor expansion) of the Appleton‐Hartree (A‐H) dispersion relation to the first and sec...

Members of the hematopoietically expressed Tec tyrosine kinase family have an important role in hematopoietic signal transduction, as exemplified by the crucial role of Btk for B-cell differentiation and activation. Although a variety of cell surface receptors have been found to activate Tec tyrosine kinases, the specific signaling pathways and substrate molecules used by Tec kinases are still ...

The satellite-to-ground communications are influenced by ionospheric plasma which varies depending on solar and geomagnetic activities as well as regions and local times. With the expansion of use of the space, continuous monitoring of the ionospheric plasma has become an important issue. In Global Positioning System (GPS), the ionospheric delay, which is proportional to ionospheric total elect...

A new method of is being developed to estimate the ionosphere’s 3-dimensional electron density distribution based on GPS slant TEC data. The goal of this effort is to develop a generalized parametric ionospheric model that is amenable to data assimilation using powerful nonlinear least-squares batch filtering techniques and related techniques. In addition to assimilating GPS TEC data, this meth...

This paper reports on a fuzzy logic correction technique for the IRI90 climatological ionospheric model that uses a sparse set of GPS total electron content (TEC) measurements to provide a significant model correction over the entire sub-solar equatorial bulge. Crisp inputs, represented by a sparse set of GPS measurements of ionospheric TEC, are ingested into the fuzzy correction model which is...

Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analyses to evaluate and compare the diagnostic accuracy of Food and Drug Administration (510K)-cleared natural rubber latex (NRL)-specific immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibody immunoassays have not been performed using well-characterized skin-testing reagents. Sera were collected from 311 subjects (131 latex puncture skin test [PST] positive and 180 PST nega...

Oxytocin either increases or inhibits cell growth in different cell subtypes. We tested here the effect of oxytocin on cell proliferation and migration of human dermal microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC) and tumor-associated endothelial cells purified from human breast carcinomas (B-TEC). Oxytocin receptors were expressed in both cell subtypes at mRNA and protein levels. Through oxytocin rec...

OBJECTIVE Self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) are a major public health problem that traditional interventions have been unable to address on a large scale. The goal of this series of studies was to take initial steps toward developing an effective SITB treatment that can be easily delivered on a very large scale. METHOD We created a brief (1-2 min), game-like app called Therapeutic...