BACKGROUND Benzalkonium chloride (BAC) is a quaternary ammonium compound (QAC) toxic to microorganisms. Inhalation is one of the major possible routes of human exposure to BAC. MATERIALS AND METHODS Experiments were performed on female Wistar rats. The rats were exposed to aerosol of BAC water solution at the target concentration of 0 (control group) and 35 mg/m(3) for 5 days (6 h/day) and, a...

BACKGROUND Lichen sclerosus is a common acquired inflammatory disorder of skin and mucous membranes. The aetiology is unknown, although HLA-subtype susceptibility and high rates of other autoimmune disorders suggest that autoantibodies to specific mucocutaneous antigens are involved. The clinicopathological similarities between lichen sclerosus and lipoid proteinosis, which results from mutatio...

Motivation: RNA sequencing enables allele-specific expression (ASE) studies that complement standard genotype expression studies for common variants and, importantly, also allow measuring the regulatory impact of rare variants. The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project is collecting RNA-seq data on multiple tissues of a same set of individuals and novel methods are required for the analysis...

We report a study of the 2.8 eV blue luminescence ~BL! in heavily Mg-doped p-GaN via resonant excitation with a tunable blue dye laser. The dependence of the BL on the excitation photon energy (Eex) is unlike that of the yellow luminescence found in n-type GaN. An Urbach-type band tail, with Urbach parameter of 33 meV is observed in the vicinity of the BL energy. We propose that the peak energy...

The systematic study of cellular reactions to purified chemical fractions of the tubercle bacillus was first demonstrated by Sabin and her co-workers.'5 16, 17, 18 These chemically purified derivatives were prepared by Anderson of Yale. The above studies have contributed greatly to our knowledge of the pathogenesis of tuberculosis. Throughout all of the above work, however, no one specific fact...

Lipoid proteinosis is a rare, autosomal recessive disorder that presents in early infancy with hoarseness, followed by pox-like and acneiform scars, along with infiltration and thickening of the skin and certain mucous membranes. Histological and ultrastructural examination reveals widespread deposition of hyaline-like material and disruption/reduplication of basement membrane around blood vess...

Stable isotope labelling of lipid precursors coupled with mass spectrometry-based lipidomic analyses and determination of isotope enrichment in substrate, intermediate and product pools provide the parameters needed to determine absolute flux rates through lipid pathways in vivo. Here, as an illustration of the power of such analyses we investigated lung phosphatidylcholine (PC) synthesis in Su...

Types A and B Niemann-Pick disease (NPD) are lipid storage disorders caused by the deficient activity of acid sphingomyelinase (ASM). In humans, NPD is associated with the dysfunction of numerous organs including the lung. Gene targeting of the ASM gene in transgenic mice produced an animal model with features typical of NPD, including pulmonary inflammation. To assess mechanisms by which ASM p...

Acknowledgements: M. Kutas (a Lady Davis fellow at Hebrew University) was supported from grants HD22614 and AG08313. We thank E. DeOchoa and T. Urbach for assistance.

A 25-year-old female patient was admitted to our outpatient clinic with postpartum hoarseness. Punch biopsy specimens obtained from the larynx and sublingual region revealed multi-folded squamous epithelium with a hyperkeratosis pattern and amorphous hyaline material aggregation. This aggregation was also remarkable around the vessels. Histochemical examination showed periodic acid-schiff-posit...