Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is a main cause of end-stage renal disease. Early diagnosis and intervention can greatly increase the prognosis. This study was aimed at investigating the clinical significance of urinary excretion of proteins with low weight including microalbuminuria (MA), α1-microprotein (A1M), β2-microglobulin (β2-MG) and retinol binding protein (RBP) as indicators for early diagno...

OBJECTIVE Vitamin A supplementation reduces bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD)/death in extremely low birth weight neonates. It was hypothesized that compared with the standard regimen of 5000 IU 3 times per week for 4 weeks, (1) a higher dose (10,000 IU 3 x per week) would increase serum retinol and retinol binding protein (RBP) and lower relative dose responses (RDR), and (2) once-per-week dosi...

Micronutrients play an important role in the development of effective immune responses. This study characterised a populations exposed to schistosome infections in terms of the relationship between micronutrients and immune responses. Levels of retinol binding protein (RBP; vitamin A marker), vitamin D, ferritin and soluble transferrin receptor (sTfR), and C reactive protein (CRP) were related ...

Post-transcriptional gene regulation is mediated through complex networks of protein-RNA interactions. The targets of only a few RNA binding proteins (RBPs) are known, even in the well-characterized budding yeast. In silico prediction of protein-RNA interactions is therefore useful to guide experiments and to provide insight into regulatory networks. Computational approaches have identified RBP...

Rank-Biased Precision (RBP) is a retrieval evaluation metric that assigns an effectiveness score to a ranking by computing a geometricly weighted sum of document relevance values, with the monotonicly decreasing weights in the geometric distribution determined via a persistence parameter p. Despite exhibiting various advantageous traits over well known existing measures such as Average Precisio...

In hemodialysis (HD) patients, serum prealbumin (TBPA) is correlated to nutritional status and outcome despite usually elevated serum levels. The purpose of this work was to study the role of TBPA-retinol-binding-protein (RBP)-retinol complex changes in the elevation of serum TBPA in HD patients. Serum TBPA, RBP, and retinol were measured in 30 otherwise healthy HD patients (15 men, 15 women) a...

AIMS Our aims were to determine the effect of alcohol (EtOH) on endothelial angiogenic activity and to delineate the cell signalling mechanisms involved. METHODS AND RESULTS Treatment of human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) with EtOH (1-100 mM, 24 h) dose-dependently increased their network formation on Matrigel (an index of angiogenesis) with a maximum response (2.5- to 3-fold inc...

Recent reports suggested that Delta1, 4 and Jagged1, 2 possessed the ability to instruct CD4(+) T cell into selection of Th1 or Th2 fates, respectively, although the underlying mechanism endowing the cleaved Notch receptor with memory of ligand involved in its activation remains elusive. To examine this, we prepared artificial antigen-presenting cells expressing either DLL1 or Jag1. Although bo...

Plant NB-LRR proteins confer robust protection against microbes and metazoan parasites by recognizing pathogen-derived avirulence (Avr) proteins that are delivered to the host cytoplasm. Microbial Avr proteins usually function as virulence factors in compatible interactions; however, little is known about the types of metazoan proteins recognized by NB-LRR proteins and their relationship with v...