BACKGROUND Phenotypic alteration of vascular smooth muscle cells (SMC) in response to injury or inflammation is an essential component of vascular disease. Evidence suggests that this process is dependent on epigenetic regulatory processes. P300, a histone acetyltransferase (HAT), activates crucial muscle-specific promoters in terminal (non-SMC) myocyte differentiation, and may be essential to ...

Spent mushroom compost (SMC) is a by-product of the mushroom industry that is used as an agricultural fertilizer. In Europe, SMC storage and use are governed by EU Nitrates Directive 91/676/EEC to protect waterways against pollution by nitrates. A health and safety risk was identified during the removal of stored SMC for land application, as the stored SMC released high levels of toxic H2S gas ...

What do SMCs do in the cell? Each SMC dimer forms a functional complex with a distinct set of non-SMC subunits. SMC1–3 forms the core of the cohesin complex that functions in sister chromatid cohesion (Figure 1, left). SMC2–4 forms part of the condensin complex, a key player in mitotic chromosome condensation (Figure 1, right). Bacterial SMC is involved in chromosome partitioning and is thought...

Mechanisms that control vascular smooth muscle cell (SMC) differentiation are poorly understood. We identify Pitx2 as a previously unknown homeodomain transcription factor that is rapidly induced in an in vitro model of SMC differentiation from multipotent stem cells. Pitx2 induces expression of multiple SMC differentiation marker genes by binding to a TAATC(C/T) cis-element, by interacting wit...

BACKGROUND Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) with sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) plus amodiaquine (AQ) is being scaled up in Sahelian countries of West Africa. However, the potential development of Plasmodium falciparum resistance to the respective component drugs is a major concern. METHODS Two cross-sectional surveys were conducted before (August 2012) and after (June 2014) a pilot im...

OBJECTIVE Vascular remodeling because of smooth muscle cell (SMC) proliferation is a common process occurring in several vascular diseases, such as atherosclerosis, aortic aneurysm, post-transplant vasculopathy, restenosis after angioplasty, etc. The molecular mechanism underlying SMC proliferation, however, is not completely understood. The objective of this study is to determine the role and ...

Two sequentially Markov coalescent models (SMC and SMC') are available as tractable approximations to the ancestral recombination graph (ARG). We present a Markov process describing coalescence at two fixed points along a pair of sequences evolving under the SMC'. Using our Markov process, we derive a number of new quantities related to the pairwise SMC', thereby analytically quantifying for th...

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of spent mushroom compost (SMC) meal on the growth performance and meat characteristics of geese. The SMC extracts contained 2.49±0.62 mg gallic acid equivalent/g dry weight (DW) and 1.08±0.15 mg quercetin equivalent/g DW of the total phenolic and flavonoid contents. A total of 120 White Roman geese, aged five weeks, were randomly distribu...

Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC) offers a theoretically wellfounded way to enable applications that preserve their users’ privacy. However, the practical use of SMC has often been questioned in the past. This is partly due to the fact that the system assumptions made in theory are hard to meet in practice and partly due to the potentially very high overhead general purpose SMC frameworks in...