Salicylic acid (SA) is a key endogenous component of local and systemic disease resistance in plants. In this study, we investigated the role of benzoic acid (BA) as precursor of SA biosynthesis in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum cv Samsun NN) plants undergoing a hypersensitive response following infection with tobacco mosaic virus or in tobacco cell suspensions elicited with beta-megaspermin, an el...

PURPOSE Benzyl alcohol (BA) is the preservative in triamcinolone acetonide (TA) suspensions, which are used in treating vitreoretinal diseases and during surgery. This paper investigates the molecular mechanisms and signaling pathways underlying BA toxicity in human retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells. METHODS Cultured human RPE cells from the ARPE-19 cell line were exposed to culture medi...

Voltage-dependent Ca++-activated K+ channels from rat skeletal muscle were reconstituted into planar lipid bilayers, and the kinetics of block of single channels by Ba++ were studied. The Ba++ association rate varies linearly with the probability of the channel being open, while the dissociation rate follows a rectangular hyperbolic relationship with open-state probability. Ba ions can be occlu...

The enterohepatic circulation of bile acids (BAs) critically depends on absorption of BA in the terminal ileum and colon, which can be affected by inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Diarrhea in IBD is believed to result in part from BA malabsorption (BAM). We explored whether IBD alters mRNA expression of key intestinal BA transporters, BA detoxifying systems, and nuclear receptors that regulate...

OBJECTIVE Biliary atresia (BA) is one of the most common causes of neonatal cholestasis. Macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) is an important mediator of inflammation and immune response in various diseases. The objective of this study was to examine the possible roles of MIF in BA. METHODS Forty-eight BA paediatric patients who had undergone a Kasai operation and 22 healthy children ...

Breast cancer is a major public health problem and the low effectiveness of conventional therapies to achieve long-term survival results in increased mortality associated with advanced breast cancers. Betulinic acid (BA) is a pentacyclic triterpene which can be isolated from number of plants grown in the tropics. It exhibits cytotoxic activity against variety of cancer cell lines. In the presen...

Nonhistone protein BA has been shown to decrease in amount in the chromatin of growth- stimulated normal rat liver (Yeoman et al. 1975. Cancer Res. 35:1249-1255) and in mitogen-stimulated normal human lymphocytes (Yeoman et al. 1976. Exp. Cell Res. 100:47- 55.). Subsequently, protein BA was purified and was shown to prefer to bind to double- stranded A-T-rich DNAs (Catino et al. 1978. Biochemis...

Brown adipocytes (BA) generate heat in response to sympathetic activation and are the main site of nonshivering thermogenesis in mammals. Although most BA are located in classic brown adipose tissue depots, BA are also abundant in the inguinal white adipose tissue (iWAT) before weaning. The number of BA is correlated with the density of sympathetic innervation in iWAT; however, the role of cont...

BACKGROUND Signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) is a transcription factor that regulates various cellular processes such as cell survival, angiogenesis and proliferation. In the present study, we examined that betulinic acid (BA), a triterpene from the bark of white birch, had the inhibitory effects on hypoxia-mediated activation of STAT3 in androgen independent human pros...

Decision-making in the presence of uncertainty is a complex process that involves both affective and cognitive factors. Both error rate and predictability have been implicated in the process of response selection during decision-making. This study examined the hypothesis that the rate of errors during decision-making differentially affects the activation in prefrontal and cingulate cortex. BOLD...