Why are we still struggling to control the devastating effects of childhood tuberculosis? This disease has been with us since ancient times and yet, even with known effective prevention and treatment strategies, much of the world has unacceptable levels of childhood morbidity and mortality due to tuberculosis. As expected, progress in identification and treatment has occurred primarily in high-...

In this note we explore a useful equivalence relation for the delay distribution in the G/M/1 queue under two different service disciplines: (i) PS (Processor Sharing); and (ii) ROS (Random Order of Service). We provide a direct probabilistic argument to show that the sojourn time under PS is equal (in distribution) to the waiting time under ROS of a customer arriving to a non-empty system. We ...

inflammatory condition is the consequence of defensive mechanism of immune system against viral and bacterial infection, tissue injury, uv radiation, stress and etc. persistently acute inflammation leads to chronic phase which is characterized by production of pro-inflammatory mediators from t cells. these molecules (e.g. il-6, tnf-α, il-1β and il-17) are mostly pleiotropic cytokines involved i...

During the past three decades, Wingless/Int (Wnt) signaling has emerged as an essential regulator crucial for neuronal development and maintenance (Inestrosa and Arenas, 2010). In addition, Wnt signaling was recently shown to be involved in the regulation of synaptic function and plasticity, which is critical for learning and memory (Oliva et al., 2013). Deregulation of Wnt signaling has been p...

The lack of responsiveness to self and non-self Ags is normally maintained by multiple mechanisms, including the suppressive activities of several T cell subsets. In this study, we show that CD8(+) T cells from both adult peripheral blood and umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells constitutively expressing HLA-DR represent a natural human CD8(+) regulatory T cell subset. Their suppressive effec...

BACKGROUND The loss of retinal pericytes is one of the earliest changes associated with diabetic retinopathy (DR). Chronic hyperglycemia induces apoptosis of these cells, leading to the onset and progression of DR. In this study, we investigated the effects of Homonoia riparia (H. riparia) and its major component, myricitrin, on high glucose (HG)-induced apoptosis of primary human retinal peric...