Introduction The patients characterized with chronic subclinical inflammation even during attack-free periods, are now considered to have an increased risk of atherosclerotic complications as well as other autoinflammatory disease. Damage to the arterial wall due to atherosclerosis causes increased arterial stiffness. Pulse wave velocity (PWV), a noninvasive measure of arterial stiffness, is ac...

Human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) is an important immunosuppressive and immunomodulatory virus that primarily infects immune cells and strongly suppresses the proliferation of infected cells. However, the mechanisms responsible for the regulation and suppression mediated by HHV-6 are still unknown. In this study, we examined the ability of HHV-6A to manipulate cell cycle progression in infected cells...

The evolution of the capsular biosynthetic (cps) locus of serogroup 6 Streptococcus pneumoniae was investigated by analyzing sequence variation within three serotype-specific cps genes from 102 serotype 6A and 6B isolates. Sequence variation within these cps genes was related to the genetic relatedness of the isolates, determined by multilocus sequence typing, and to the inferred patterns of re...

Introduction The patients characterized with chronic subclinical inflammation even during attack-free periods, are now considered to have an increased risk of atherosclerotic complications as well as other autoinflammatory disease. Damage to the arterial wall due to atherosclerosis causes increased arterial stiffness. Pulse wave velocity (PWV), a noninvasive measure of arterial stiffness, is ac...

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are proteolytic enzymes capable of degrading extracellular matrix. Their role has been emphasized in tumor invasion, metastasis and tumor-induced angiogenesis. The gene encoding MMP-3 is polymorphic and an insertion (6A)/deletion (5A) polymorphism (5A/6A polymorphism) in the MMP-3 gene may have functional significance in the regulation of its expression. In the ...

The immune responses of naive and different memory subsets of CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells to human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) have not been previously investigated. We show that HHV-6A induces cell division, as measured by 5,6-carboxyfluorescein succinimidyl ester dye and flow cytometry, predominantly in two populations of effector memory CD4(+) and CD8(+) T cells (T(EM) and T(EMRA)); naïve (T(N)) and...

Vitamin D3 (1) is metabolized by various cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes, resulting in the formation of diverse metabolites. Among them, 4α,25-dihydroxyvitamin (6a) and 4β,25-dihydroxyvitamin (6b) are both produced from 25-hydroxyvitamin (2) CYP3A4. However, 6b detectable serum, whereas 6a not. We hypothesized that reason for this a difference susceptibility to CYP24A1-mediated metabolism. Here, ...

We report on the steady-state, picosecond and femtosecond time-resolved studies of a charge and proton transfer dye 6-amino-2-(2'-hydroxyphenyl)benzoxazole (6A-HBO) and its methylated derivative 6-amino-2-(2'-methoxyphenyl)benzoxazole (6A-MBO), in different solvents. With femtosecond resolution and comparison with the photobehaviour of 6A-MBO, we demonstrate for 6A-HBO in solution, the photopro...

Recently, Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes 6C and 6D have been identified. It is thought that they emerged by the replacement of wciN(β) in the capsular loci of serotypes 6A and 6B, respectively. However, their evolution has not been unveiled yet. To investigate the evolution of four serotypes of S. pneumoniae serogroup 6, four genes of the capsular polysaccharide synthesis (cps) locus, wchA,...