Two related integral membrane proteins, claudin-1 and -2, recently were identified as novel components of tight junction (TJ) strands. Here, we report six more claudin-like proteins, indicating the existence of a claudin gene family. Three of these were reported previously as RVP1, Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin receptor, and TMVCF, but their physiological functions were not determined. Th...

Broiler chickens are rather resistant to deoxynivalenol and thus, clinical signs are rarely seen. However, effects of subclinical concentrations of deoxynivalenol on both the intestine and the liver are less frequently studied at the molecular level. During our study, we investigated the effects of three weeks of feeding deoxynivalenol on the gut wall morphology, intestinal barrier function and...

introduction: hyperprolactinemia is a common serious side effect of antipsychotic medications that are currently used in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia. pharmacogenetic approaches offer the possibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers for predicting the risk of this side effect. we investigated a possible relationship between variants (snps) in genes for cytochrome 2d6 (...

background: niche cells, regulating spermatogonial stem cells (sscs) fate are believed to have a reciprocal communication with sscs. the present study was conducted to evaluate the effect of ssc elimination on the gene expression of glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (gdnf), fibroblast growth factor 2 (fgf2) and kit ligand (kitlg), which are the main growth factors regulating sscs deve...

background: one of the most important producers of high quality industrial enzymes is the gram-positive bacterium, bacillus subtilis (b. subtilis). one major limitation that hinders the wide application of b. subtilis is the secretion of high levels of extracellular proteases which degrade the secreted foreign proteins. in this study, homologus recombination technique was used to knock out its ...

background: peroxisome proliferator activated receptor gamma (pparγ), a member of nuclear receptor superfamily, comprises two isoforms in mouse. these two isoforms are encoded by different mrnas, which are arisen by alternative promoter usage. there are two promoter regions upstream of pparγ gene. a 3 kb fragment, containing several transcription factor binding sites, acts as pparγ1 promoter re...

new cancer therapies with novel mechanisms and functions are needed to treat patients with different cancers. virotherapy is a good scenario for such treatment. the advantages of virotherapy include the potential lack of cross resistance with standard therapies and the ability to cause tumor destruction by numerous mechanisms. oncolytic virus not only possesses unique mechanisms of action that ...

bluetongue is an infectious disease that primarily affects sheep. but due to serious socioeconomic consequence of it outbreaks on the international trade it has been included in the oie notifiable diseases (list a). during 2007-8, total number of 130 blood samples gathered from suspected sheep to bluetongue disease in seropositive region including khuzestan, kurdistan, fars, ilam and qum provin...

the lpsa gene, a late acting gene in the biosynthetic pathway of ergovaline, a suspected causative agent for fescue toxicosis in cattle, has been cloned from neotyphodium lolii, an endophytic fungus of lolium perenne. in this study, a similar gene was detected in several strains of endophytic neotyphodium spp. isolated from grass hosts endogenous to iran using direct and nested-pcr assays. exce...