BACKGROUND β2-adrenoceptor agonists have been shown to reduce the lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced cytokine release by human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs). We compare the expression of β2-adrenoceptors and the inhibitory effect of formoterol and salmeterol on the LPS-induced release of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-6 and a range of chemokines (CCL2, 3, 4, and IL-8...

HDL and its major protein component apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I) exert anti-inflammatory effects, inhibit monocyte chemotaxis/adhesion, and reduce vascular macrophage content in inflammatory conditions. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the apoA-I mimetic 4F modulates the function of monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) by regulating the expression of key cell surface receptors on MDMs...

Background: Among the cells involved in inflammatory process of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) [1], macrophages play a key role through their capacity to polarize into “classically” or “alternatively” activated phenotypes (M1 M2) and making important players for cascade anti-inflammatory reaction, respectively [2]. CTLA4-Ig fusion protein (abatacept) has been shown contribute macrophage shift from M...

This study examined what discourse markers (DM) and their characteristics are in English. It described the range of uses of English discourse markers in conversations included in Interchange books. It also determined the most frequently used discourse markers. It was found that "oh" and "well" were the most frequently used discourse markers in the conversations, and then the functions of them w...

This paper explores several aspects together for a fine-grained Chinese discourse analysis. We deal with the issues of ambiguous discourse markers, ambiguous marker linkings, and more than one discourse marker. A universal feature representation is proposed. The pair-once postulation, cross-discourse-unit-first rule and word-pair-marker-first rule select a set of discourse markers from ambiguou...

Pancreatic cancer (PC) remains one of the most challenging solid tumors to treat with a high unmet medical need as patients poorly respond to standard-of-care-therapies. Prominent desmoplastic reaction involving cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) and the immune cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME) and their cross-talk play a significant role in tumor immune escape and progression. To ide...

During early Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (Map) infection, complex interactions occur between the bacteria, cells from the mononuclear phagocyte system (MPS) including both resident (macrophages and dendritic cells) and recruited (monocytes) cells, and other mucosal sentinel cells such as γδ T lymphocytes. Though the details of early host-pathogen interactions in cattle remai...

Discourse markers are words or phrases that function as indicators of the structure of discourse by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic. This study reports on the Swedish discourse markers men ‘but’/‘and’ and så ‘so’, their functions and prosodic correlates in dialogue.

this study investigated two major types of metadiscourse markers as used in typical sales contracts, written by english natives and iranian non-natives. in so doing, 60 sales contracts were selected, 30 written by native english and 30 by iranian non-natives. based on hyland and tse’s taxonomy, the contracts were codified and classified in terms of the frequency and percentage of the interactiv...

In this paper, I will be reporting on my research into the developmental aspects of the use of discourse markers, and will attempt to show that they are learned considerably earlier than is usually assumed. The study uses the data of 4 to12-year-old children’s narratives where the subjects are asked to recall either the Fish Story or the Beach Story. The results demonstrate the early onset of d...