Motile cilia throughout the bios possess a constant number of fibrils which are arranged in a regular and consistent pattern. Yet, during a study on the fine morphological changes of human uterine epithelium in different phases of the cycle, we observed an impressive number of cilia showing a wide variety of structural anomalies previously unreported in a mammalian tissue. Such a conspicuous de...

BACKGROUND The general concept that haemoglobin is only a carrier protein for oxygen and carbon dioxide is challenged since recent studies have shown haemoglobin expression in non-erythroid cells and the protection of haemoglobin against oxidative and nitrosative stress. Using microarrays, we previously showed expression of haemoglobins alpha, beta, delta and gamma and the haeme metabolizing en...

BACKGROUND Estradiol (E(2)) is an important promoter of the growth of both eutopic and ectopic endometrium. The findings with regard to the expression and activity of steroidogenic enzymes in endometrium of controls, in endometrium of endometriosis patients and in endometriotic lesions are not consistent. METHODS In this study, we have looked at the mRNA expression and protein levels of a ran...

The endometrium plays a key role in reproduction, and this function is tightly regulated by endogenous and xenobiotic steroids. Sulphation, catalysed by members of the sulphotransferase (SULT) enzyme family, is a major deactivating mechanism for steroid hormones and we have investigated the expression and regulation in vivo of SULT in the human endometrium. In the normal cycling endometrium, ex...

Human uterine endometrium undergoes a complex pattern of changes in proliferation and secretory activity during the menstrual cycle. In the present study, telomerase activity in normal endometrium was examined using a non-radioisotope PCR-based telomeric repeat amplification protocol assay. Various levels of telomerase activity were detected in the 60 normal endometrial samples examined, depend...

Objective: The presence of nerve fibers in human endometrium remains unsettled but recent immunocytochemical studies have shown that there was increased innervation in the endometrium from women with endometriosis and some nerve fibers in the normally cycling human endometrium. In the current study, we used uterine tissue cryosections from normal cycling women, which previously provided better ...

Repair of human endometrium after menstruation and preparation of the endometrium for implantation involves profound angiogenic changes. Vascular endothelial cell growth factor (VEGF) is a recently identified growth factor with significant angiogenic properties. Four species of mRNA encoding VEGFs were identified in human endometrium and myometrium. All species were present throughout the menst...

We studied cellular c-jun messenger RNA (mRNA) expression in the human endometrium during the menstrual cycle (n = 47) and in human decidua during pregnancy (n = 8), by using digoxigenin-labeled RNA probes in in situ hybridization. The same tissue samples were also analyzed for c-Jun protein and the proliferation marker Ki-67. In the proliferative endometrium, strong expression of c-jun was det...

Cell invasion targets specific tissues in physiological placental implantation and pathological metastasis, which raises questions about how this process is controlled. We compare dermis and endometrium capacities to support trophoblast invasion, using matching sets of human primary fibroblasts in a coculture assay with human placental explants. Substituting endometrium, the natural trophoblast...