BACKGROUND Proinflammatory cytokines like tumor necrosis factor-alpha and oxidative stress induce apoptotic cell death in endothelial cells (ECs). Systemic inflammation and increased oxidative stress in congestive heart failure (CHF) coincide with enhanced EC apoptosis and the development of endothelial dysfunction. Therefore, we investigated the effects of antioxidative vitamin C therapy on EC...

This study was undertaken to measure the response of stretch-activated ion channels (SAC) and transcript levels of the oncogene c-fos to separate bouts of eccentric contractions (EC). It was hypothesized that SAC in rat skeletal muscle would contribute to resting membrane potential depolarization after separate repeated bouts of EC. Blockage of SAC during an EC training regime also tested the n...

Polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid [poly(I-C)] is a synthetic double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) that simulates a viral-infected state in cells. It has been shown that viral infection, as well as poly(I-C), stimulates leukocyte adhesion to endothelial cell (EC) monolayers and that this is mediated through the surface expression of the adhesion molecules E-selectin, vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM...

The natural products of both eremofortin C (EC) and PR toxin are secondary metabolites of Penicillium roqueforti. Because the chemical structures of EC and PR toxin are closely related to each other and differ only by a hydroxyl functional group in EC and an aldehyde functional group in PR toxin at the C-12 position, the chemical transformation of EC into PR toxin was investigated. Oxidation wi...

In this paper, we show that the popular C-SVM, soft-margin support vector classifier is equivalent to minimization of Buffered Probability of Exceedance (bPOE) by introducing a new SVM formulation, called the EC-SVM, which is derived as a bPOE minimization problem. Since it is derived from a simple bPOE minimization problem, the EC-SVM is simple to interpret with a meaningful free parameter, op...

The aim of this study was to determine if dysplastic endocervical cells (EC) posses a neoplastic potential as precursor lesions to adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS). The malignant potential was determined by assessing the ploidy status and proliferative activity by flow cytometry and c-myc expression by immunohistochemistry. The studied parameters were assessed separately in morphologically normal, ...

This analysis was conducted to determine whether the hepatitis C virus (HCV) viral kinetics (VK) model can predict viral load (VL) decreases for nonnucleoside polymerase inhibitors (NNPolIs) and protease inhibitors (PIs) after 3-day monotherapy studies of patients infected with genotype 1 chronic HCV. This analysis includes data for 8 NNPolIs and 14 PIs, including VL decreases from 3-day monoth...

Let f : {0, 1} → {0, 1} be a Boolean function. The certificate complexity C(f) is a complexity measure that is quadratically tight for the zero-error randomized query complexity R0(f): C(f) ≤ R0(f) ≤ C(f) . In this paper we study a new complexity measure that we call expectational certificate complexity EC(f), which is also a quadratically tight bound on R0(f): EC(f) ≤ R0(f) = O(EC(f) ). We pro...

The genus Camellia (C.) contains many species, including C. sinensis, C. assamica, and C. taliensis, C. gymnogyna and C. tachangensis. The polyphenols of C. sinensis and C. assamica are flavan-3-ols monomers and their dimers and trimmers. However, the biosynthesis of procyanidins in Camellia genus remains unclear. In the present study, a comparative chemical analysis of flavan-3-ols, flavan-3-o...

Hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) regulates cell growth, motility, and morphogenesis of various types of cells via its receptor c-Met. In the growth of endometrium, HGF/c-Met signaling promotes the proliferation of both endometrial epithelial cells and stromal cells. In the onset and development of several cancers, HGF/c-Met signaling drives carcinogenesis and cancer invasion and metastasis. In en...