background: cellulite is the accumulation of subcutaneous fat and connective tissue in tights and buttocks. xanthines, such as aminophylline, are used as phosphodiesterase inhibitors, and are also adenosine receptor antagonists. objectives: the aim of the present study was to characterize in vitro aminophylline transdermal absorption through shed snake skin, and to investigate the absorption en...

Enhancers are cis elements that play an important role in regulating gene expression by enhancing it. Recent study of modifications revealed that enhancers are a large group of functional elements with many different subgroups, which have different biological activities and regulatory effects on target genes. As powerful auxiliary tools, several computational methods have been proposed to disti...

Enhancers are distal regulatory elements that can activate tissue-specific gene expression and are abundant throughout mammalian genomes. Although substantial progress has been made toward genome-wide annotation of mammalian enhancers, their temporal activity patterns and global contributions in the context of developmental in vivo processes remain poorly explored. Here we used epigenomic profi...

Transcription factor binding, chromatin modifications and large scale chromatin re-organization underlie progressive, irreversible cell lineage commitments and differentiation. We know little, however, about chromatin changes as cells enter transient, reversible states such as migration. Here we demonstrate that when human progenitor keratinocytes either differentiate or migrate they form compl...

Identification of cell type-specific enhancers is important for understanding the regulation of programs controlling cellular development and differentiation. Enhancers are typically marked by the co-transcriptional activator protein p300 or by groups of cell-expressed transcription factors. We hypothesized that a unique set of enhancers regulates gene expression in human erythroid cells, a hig...

There have been numerous efforts to formulate insulin into an oral dosage form. The major problems involved with the oral administration of insulin are acidic and enzymatic decomposition by the gastric medium, and poor absorption in the small intestine due to its macromolecular structure. This study attempted to test the enhancing ability of two absorption enhancers, sodium glycocholate (Na-G...

Transcriptional enhancers are short (200-1500 base pairs) DNA segments that are able to dramatically boost transcription from the promoter of a target gene. Originally discovered in simian virus 40 (SV40), a small DNA virus, transcription enhancers were soon also found in immunoglobulin genes and other cellular genes as key determinants of cell-type-specific gene expression. Enhancers can exert...

Metazoan genes are embedded in a rich milieu of regulatory information that often includes multiple enhancers possessing overlapping activities. In this study, we employ quantitative live imaging methods to assess the function of pairs of primary and shadow enhancers in the regulation of key patterning genes-knirps, hunchback, and snail-in developing Drosophila embryos. The knirps enhancers exh...