A major obstacle to enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) with recombinant human acid-α-glucosidase (rhGAA) for Pompe disease is the development of high titers of anti-rhGAA antibodies in a subset of patients, which often leads to a loss of treatment efficacy. In an effort to induce sustained immune tolerance to rhGAA, we supplemented the rhGAA therapy with a weekly intravenous injection of syntheti...

The Drosophila adipose tissue, or fat body, and the bodywall muscle are two major tissues derived from the mesoderm. Although much is known about the lineage of muscle cells, little is known about the development of the fat body. Using known genes and an enhancer trap (29D), we have begun to trace the lineage of the cells comprising the fat body. The genes Adh (alcohol dehydrogenase) and DCg1 (...

Directly acting antivirals recently have become available for the treatment of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, but there is no prophylactic vaccine for HCV. In the present study, we took advantage of the properties of Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) to develop antigens for use in a HCV vaccine. Notably, the surface-exposed JEV envelope protein is tolerant of inserted foreign epitopes, perm...

Unwarping an omni-directional image into a perspective-view one is easy for a single-viewpoint (SVP) designed catadioptric omnidirectional camera. But misalignment between the components (such as the mirror and the lens) of this kind of camera creates multiple viewpoints and distorts the unwarped image if the SVP constraint is assumed. The SVP constraint is relaxed in this study and a systemati...

Neural stem cells often generate different cell types in a fixed birth order as a result of temporal specification of the progenitors. In Drosophila, the first temporal identity of most neural stem cells (neuroblasts) in the embryonic ventral nerve cord is specified by the transient expression of the transcription factor Hunchback. When reaching the next temporal identity, this expression is sw...

BACKGROUND Altitude and gravity changes during aeromedical evacuations induce exacerbated cardiovascular responses in unstable patients. Non-invasive cardiac output monitoring is difficult to perform in this environment with limited access to the patient. We evaluated the feasibility and accuracy of stroke volume estimation by finger photoplethysmography (SVp) in hypergravity. METHODS Finger ...

Sublethally irradiated mice were administered with scorpion venom peptides (SVP) or with PBS in the saline control group, 3 days before and 7 consecutive days after irradiation. Hematopoietic recovery was assessed by bone marrow (BM) cell proliferation index (PI) and colony forming unit-granulocyte/macrophage (CFU-GM), spleen weight index (SI) and thymus weight index (TI), colony-forming unit-s...

Background Assessing fidelity to complex healthcare interventions in clinical trials is a challenging area. ‘ICONS’ is a cluster randomised controlled feasibility trial of a systematic voiding programme (SVP), incorporating bladder training and prompted voiding, to promote post-stroke continence. Here we describe feasibility of one aspect of fidelity assessment: the day-to-day implementation of...

The timing of the switch from vegetative to reproductive development in Arabidopsis thaliana is controlled by an intricate network of flowering pathways, which converge on the transcriptional regulation of two floral pathway integrators, FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) and SUPPRESSOR OF OVEREXPRESSION OF CONSTANS1 (SOC1). SHORT VEGETATIVE PHASE (SVP) acts as a key flowering regulator that represses the ...

The protein encoded by the zebrafish gene svp[40] belongs to a distinct group within the steroid hormone receptor superfamily that includes Drosophila seven-up and several vertebrate orphan receptors. Svp[40] shares a particularly high degree of amino acid sequence identity (approximately 86%) with the mammalian transcription factors ARP-1 and COUP. The gene is expressed in specific regional an...