INTRODUCTION The epithelial and endothelial barriers of the airway mucosa are critical for regulation of tissue homeostasis and protection against pathogens or other tissue damaging agents. In response to a viral infection, epithelial cells must signal to the endothelium to initiate immune cell recruitment. This is a highly temporal regulated process; however, the mechanisms of this cross-talk ...

BACKGROUND Plasmodium parasites need to cross the midgut and salivary gland epithelia to complete their life cycle in the mosquito. However, our understanding of the molecular mechanism and the mosquito genes that participate in this process is still very limited. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We identified an Anopheles gambiae epithelial serine protease (AgESP) that is constitutively expres...

objective: helicobacter pylori has a well-established role in the development of gastric cancer. in vitro studies reveal increased proliferation of the gastric mucosa in the presence of h. pylori infection. it has been also shown that production of some cytokines, such as interleukin-1 beta (il-1b) is increased in h. pylori infection. in addition, il-1b increases proliferation of gastric epithe...

Quantifying changes in partial resistances of epithelial barriers in vitro is a challenging and time-consuming task in physiology and pathophysiology. Here, we demonstrate that electrical properties of epithelial barriers can be estimated reliably by combining impedance spectroscopy measurements, mathematical modeling and machine learning algorithms. Conventional impedance spectroscopy is often...

Objective(s): Severe injuries are often associated with tissue hypothyroidism, elevated damaging mediators in circulation, and broken gut epithelial barrier.  However, the relationships between the hypothyroid state and gut epithelial damage are largely unknown.  Therefore, in this study, we investigated the effects of L-thyroxine (T4) on in vitro models of intact and ...

The ability of antibodies to exploit antigenic differences between normal and malignant tissues and to exact a variety of antitumor responses offers significant advantages to conventional forms of therapy. Several monoclonal antibodies (mAb) have already proved to be relatively well tolerated and effective for the treatment of many different malignant diseases. However, mAbs must overcome subst...

Protein kinase C activation leads to tight junctional leakiness and, consequently, to increased transepithelial (paracellular) solute flux across epithelial barriers. This leakiness is shown here to result in as much as a 20-fold increase in the transepithelial flux of insulin. Using an epithelial/fibroblast coculture model, this transepithelially transported insulin is shown to be biologically...