PURPOSE To examine the proteins differentially expressed in the tear film of people with keratoconus and normal subjects. METHODS Unstimulated tears from people with keratoconus (KC) and controls (C) were collected using a capillary tube. Tear proteins from people with KC and controls were partitioned using a novel in-solution electrophoresis, Microflow 10 (ProteomeSep), and analyzed using li...

Oxidative stress may play a role in the pathogenesis of keratoconus (KC) and Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD). Iron may promote the stress by the Fenton reaction, so its homeostasis should be strictly controlled. Transferrin is essential for iron homeostasis because it transports iron from plasma into cells. The malfunction of transferrin, which may be caused by variation in its gene ...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have not shown a correlation between knuckle cracking (KC) and hand osteoarthritis (OA). However, one study showed an inverse correlation between KC and metacarpophalangeal joint OA. METHODS We conducted a retrospective case-control study among persons aged 50 to 89 years who received a radiograph of the right hand during the last 5 years. Patients had radiographic...

Programmed cell death of epidermal keratinocytes (KC) results in the formation of cornified cells, which constitute the outermost skin layer, the stratum corneum. Here we show by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, western blot, and immunohistochemistry that epidermal KC express caspase-14, a member of the caspase family of pro-apoptotic proteases, in a tissue-specific manner. Casp...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the sealing ability of materials filled in the orifice after root canal treatment. A total of 100 root canal-treated teeth were divided into six experimental groups: 1, Protect Liner F (PL); 2, Panavia F (PF); 3, DC core-Light cured (DCL); 4, DC core-Chemically cured (DCC); 5, Super-EBA (SE); 6, Ketac (KC). The materials were filled--to a depth of 4 mm--in ...

An important and fundamental issue in designing structured peer-to-peer networks is the tradeoff between the number of logical links and the number of hops. We present a flexible resource location protocol called K-Chord, for KC, which is based on the idea of proportional search. We conduct indepth study on KC. We show that KC achieves an excellent tradeoff between the number of logical links a...

Solution: By the adjunction formula, the canonical divisor class is KC = OC(d− 3), that is, plane curves of degree d− 3 cut out canonical divisors on C. It follows that if d ≥ 4 then any two points p, q ∈ C impose independent conditions on the canonical series |KC |; that is, h(KC(−p − q)) = g − 2, so by Riemann-Roch h(OC(p+ q)) = 1, i.e., C is not hyperelliptic. Similarly, if d ≥ 5 then any th...

Any mapping S : C → K, where K is a field and C = (C,Σ) is a Σ-algebra, is called a KC-series. These series are natural generalizations of both formal series on strings over a field and the tree series introduced by Berstel and Reutenauer [1]. We consider various operations on KC-series and their effects on the linear extensions of the series. We also study some algebraic aspects of theKΣ-algeb...