OBJECTIVE To investigate α-toxin-induced apoptosis of umbilical vein endothelial cells and explore its role in vertical infection of Staphylococcus aureus L-form. METHODS HUV-EC-C cells exposed to different concentrations (0, 10, 30, 90, and 270 ng/ml) of α-toxin for different time lengths (0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 h) were examined for apoptosis using flow cytometry with Annexin V-PI staining. The l...

Systemic urticaria in a 64-year-old woman was diagnosed as leukocytoclastic vasculitis by a punch biopsy of the skin. Her physical findings improved after prescription of prednisolone at a dose of 20 mg/day, but the skin rash relapsed with renal dysfunction, proteinuria, and hematuria when the dose of prednisolone was reduced over a period of 9 months to 1 mg/day. She was admitted to our instit...

Next to the shortest path distance, the second most popular distance function between vertices in a graph is the commute distance (resistance distance). For two vertices u and v, the hitting time Huv is the expected time it takes a random walk to travel from u to v. The commute time is its symmetrized version Cuv = Huv + Hvu. In our paper we study the behavior of hitting times and commute dista...

The ability to induce somatic cells to pluripotency by ectopic expression of defined transcription factors (e.g. KLF-4, OCT4, SOX2, c-MYC, or KOSM) has transformed the future of regenerative medicine. Here we report somatic cell reprogramming of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), yielding induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells with the fastest kinetics, and one of the highest reprog...

The Simulcheck method for evaluating the accuracy of color simulation tools in relation to dichromats is described and used to test three color simulation tools: Variantor, Coblis, and Vischeck. A total of 10 dichromats (five protanopes, five deuteranopes) and 10 normal trichromats participated in the current study. Simulcheck includes two psychophysical tasks: the Pseudoachromatic Stimuli Iden...

Expression of follicle-stimulation hormone receptor (FSHR) is confined to gonads and at low levels to some extragonadal tissues like human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC). FSH-FSHR signaling was shown to promote HUVEC angiogenesis and thereafter suggested to have an influential role in pregnancy. We revisited hereby the expression and functionality of FSHR in HUVECs angiogenesis, and w...

Previous reports have provided evidence to support the view that the de novo synthesis of bradykinin (BK) B(1) receptor is involved in the induction of vascular responses in human umbilical vein (HUV). In the present study, we evaluated different pharmacological tools to further analyze this up-regulation process in HUV. Concentration-response curves to des-Arg(9)-BK, a selective BK B(1) recept...

Culture conditions that favor rapid multiplication of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUV-EC) also support long-term serial propagation of the cells. This is routinely achieved when HUV-EC are grown in Medium 199 (M-199) supplemented with fetal bovine serum (FBS) and endothelial cell growth factor (ECGF), on a human fibronectin (HFN) matrix. The HUV-EC can shift from a proliferative to ...

We determine the computational complexity of several dmision p r o b lerns related to hamiltonian-connected graphs. In particular, we show that it is NP-complete to determine whether a graph G is harniltonian-connected. We also show that it is NP-complete to determine whether G is hamiltonian-connerted from a distinguished vertex u . Lastly, we consider the complexity of multiple-solution and u...