The effects of hyperkalemia on serum and myocardial digoxin (DX) concentration was studied in conjunction with hemodynamic changes in 31 normal dogs. The myocardial DX concentration in the hyperkalemic (HK) group was significantly lower than that in normokalemic (NK) group, despite a significantly higher serum DX concentration in the HK group. In the HK group, the myocardial sodium concentratio...

Glucose (Glc) metabolism protects cells against oxidant injury. By virtue of their central position in both Glc uptake and utilization, hexokinases (HKs) are ideally suited to contribute to these effects. Compatible with this hypothesis, endogenous HK activity correlates inversely with injury susceptibility in individual renal cell types. We recently reported that ectopic HK expression mimics t...

Association of hexokinase (HK) with mitochondria preserves mitochondrial integrity and is an important mechanism by which cancer cells are protected against hypoxic conditions. Maintenance of mitochondrial integrity also figures prominently as a major characteristic of many cardioprotective manipulations. In this study, we provide evidence that cardioprotective interventions may promote HK redi...

BACKGROUND Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) has a high incidence rate in Southern China. Although there are conventional therapies, the side effects and toxicities are not always tolerable for patients. Recently, the tumoricidal effect of ginsenosides on different cancer cells has been studied. This study aims to investigate the anti-cancer effect of ginsenosides on NPC cells and their underlying...

Tumor cells preferentially use anaerobic glycolysis rather than oxidative phosphorylation to generate energy. Hexokinase II (HK-II) is necessary for anaerobic glycolysis and displays aberrant expression in malignant cells. The current study aimed to evaluate the role of HK-II in the survival and biological function of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Our study demonstrated that high expression o...

H-kininogen (high-molecular-mass kininogen, HK) is the precursor of the vasoactive peptide hormone bradykinin (BK). Previous work has demonstrated that HK binds to Streptococcus pyogenes through M-proteins, fibrous surface proteins and important virulence factors of these bacteria. Here we find that M-protein-expressing bacteria absorb HK from human plasma. The HK bound to the bacteria was foun...

BACKGROUND Dietary potassium supplementation in hypertensive rats is cardioprotective. This protection includes a blood pressure independent reduction in the amount of damage caused by cerebral ischemia. Therefore, we hypothesized that dietary potassium supplementation would improve the outcome of ischemic stroke by improving cerebral vessel structure in normotensive rats. METHODS Wistar Kyot...

Effects of theophylline, lidocaine, cyclophosphamide, hyoscine N-butyl bromide, tranexamic acid and cytarabine on hexokinase (HK) from human erythrocytes have been investigated in vitro. In addition, in vivo effects of theophylline and lidocaine were investigated in rats. HK was purified from human red blood cells by DEAE-Sephadex A50 ion exchange chromatography. HK activity was measured spectr...

The Haley-Knott (HK) regression method continues to be a popular approximation to standard interval mapping (IM) of quantitative trait loci (QTL) in experimental crosses. The HK method is favored for its dramatic reduction in computation time compared to the IM method, something that is particularly important in simultaneous searches for multiple interacting QTL. While the HK method often appro...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of β2-microglobulin (β2-M) on the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in renal tubular epithelial cells. METHODS A human kidney proximal tubular cell line (HK-2) was used as the proximal tubular cell model. HK-2 cells were exposed to different concentrations of β2-M (5, 10, 25, and 50 μM) for up to 24, 48 and 72 h. Th...