Background. The pretreatment albumin and globulin ratio (AGR) was an inflammation-associated factor which was related to the overall survival in various malignancies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prognostic value of AGR in patients with gastric cancer. Method. This retrospective study included 862 cases pathologically diagnosed with gastric cancer. All patients were randomly divide...

The prognosis of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) remains poor whereas predictive models for survival prediction in ICC patients following curative resection are limited. Herein, we established a novel inflammation-based score derived from preoperative albumin to gamma-glutamyltransferase ratio (AGR) and evaluated its prognostic significance in ICC patients underwent curative resection. Pr...

BACKGROUND The accessory gene regulator (agr) and staphylococcal accessory regulator (sarA) play opposing roles in Staphylococcus aureus biofilm formation. There is mounting evidence to suggest that these opposing roles are therapeutically relevant in that mutation of agr results in increased biofilm formation and decreased antibiotic susceptibility while mutation of sarA has the opposite effec...

A significant number of genome sequences of Clostridium botulinum and related species have now been determined. In silico analysis of these data revealed the presence of two distinct agr loci (agr-1 and agr-2) in all group I strains, each encoding putative proteins with similarity to AgrB and AgrD of the well-studied Staphylococcus aureus agr quorum sensing system. In S. aureus, a small diffusi...

Background: Although various inflammation-based indexes in esophageal carcinoma have been documented, but the prognostic value of the albumin-to-globulin ratio(AGR) and its correlation with fibrinogen in resectable ESCC remain unknown. Methods: The levels of pre-treatment serum common acute phase proteins (including CRP, albumin and fribrinogen) were retrospectively analyzed in 447 patients wit...

Anterior Gradient Protein (AGR-2) is reported to be over-expressed in many epithelial cancers and promotes metastasis. A clear-cut mechanism for its observed function(s) has not been previously identified. We found significant upregulation of AGR-2 expression in a bone metastatic prostate cancer cell line, PC3, following culturing in bone marrow-conditioned medium. Substantial AGR-2 expression ...

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains are characterized by a heterogeneous expression of resistance. We have previously shown in clinical oxacillin-susceptible, mecA-positive MRSA strains that selection from a very heterogeneous (HeR) to highly homogeneous (HoR) resistant phenotype was mediated by acquisition of mutations through an oxacillin-induced SOS response. In the pr...

The quorum-sensing system of Staphylococcus aureus, the accessory gene regulator (Agr) system, is responsible for increased transcription of certain exoprotein genes and decreased transcription of certain cell wall-associated proteins during the postexponential phase of growth. This regulation is important for virulence, as evidenced by a reduction in virulence associated with a loss of the Agr...

The production of cell surface proteins in Staphylococcus aureus is generally down-regulated in the postexponential growth phase by the global regulator agr. The effector of this regulation is the RNAIII molecule, which is encoded within the agr locus. RNAIII seems to regulate most target genes at the level of transcription, but it also has an effect on the translation of some genes. To study t...

We previously reported that the cvfB gene (SA1223) of Staphylococcus aureus is responsible for the virulence of this pathogenic bacterium. We show here that the cvfB gene regulates exoprotein gene expression. In a cvfB gene deletion mutant, hemolysin, DNase, and protease production were decreased, whereas protein A expression was increased. The amount of RNAIII, the transcript from the P3 promo...