This study examines the relationship between cellular sphingomyelin content and the distribution of unesterified cholesterol between the plasma-membrane pool and the putative intracellular regulatory pool. The sphingomyelin content of cultured human skin fibroblasts was reduced by treatment of intact cells with extracellularly added neutral sphingomyelinase, and subsequent changes in the activi...

BACKGROUND Inclusion bodies (IBs) are aggregated proteins that form clusters when protein is overexpressed in heterologous expression systems. IBs have been considered as non-usable proteins, but recently they are being used as functional materials, catalytic particles, drug delivery agents, immunogenic structures, and as a raw material in recombinant therapeutic protein purification. However, ...

Airway epithelial cells are constantly exposed to environmental insults such as air pollution or tobacco smoke that may contain high levels of reactive nitrogen and reactive oxygen species. Previous work from our laboratory demonstrated that the reactive oxygen species (ROS), hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)), specifically activates neutral sphingomyelinase 2 (nSMase2) to generate ceramide and induc...

Sphingolipids are important in many brain functions but their role in Alzheimer's disease (AD) is not completely defined. A major limit is availability of fresh brain tissue with defined AD pathology. The discovery that cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) contains abundant nanoparticles that include synaptic vesicles and large dense core vesicles offer an accessible sample to study these organelles, whil...

BACKGROUND/AIMS Major depressive disorder is a severe, common and often chronic disease with a significant mortality due to suicide. The pathogenesis of major depression is still unknown. It is assumed that a reduction of neurogenesis in the hippocampus plays an important role in the development of major depressive disorder. However, the mechanisms that control proliferation of neuronal stem ce...