Phokela, Sarabjit S., Sara Peleg, Fernando R. Moya, and Joseph L. Alcorn. Regulation of human pulmonary surfactant protein gene expression by 1 ,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3. Am J Physiol Lung Cell Mol Physiol 289: L617–L626, 2005. First published June 10, 2005; doi:10.1152/ajplung.00129.2004.—1 ,25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3 [1,25(OH)2D3] has been reported to stimulate lung maturity, alveolar type II cell ...

Fetal therapies regularly result in iatrogenic preterm premature rupture of the fetal membranes (iPPROM), which is associated with birth. Biomaterials that promote healing traumatized (FMs) may prevent iPPROM-associated births, addressing this unmet clinical need. Here, a fully defined synthetic poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) hydrogel developed to study functions human amnion-derived mesenchymal s...

background: severe preeclampsia is a quite well-known entity with high incidence of both maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. although little is known about its etiology, inherited disorders of hemostasis and antiphospholipid syndrome have been postulated as common causes. the present study was conducted to evaluate the association of these two entities with preeclampsia in a group of ir...

Beta-adrenergic signaling plays an important role in the natural history of dilated cardiomyopathies. Chronic activation of beta-adrenergic receptors (beta1-AR and beta2-AR) during periods of cardiac stress ultimately harms the failing heart by mechanisms that include alterations in gene expression. Here, we show that stimulation of beta-ARs with isoproterenol in neonate rat ventricular myocyte...

The antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) is associated with thrombosis and fetal death but the pathologic mechanisms are poorly understood. Since endothelial protein C receptor (EPCR) plays a role in the anticoagulant system and in placental development, we hypothesized that anti-EPCR autoantibodies may be involved in clinical manifestations of APS and in fetal loss. The levels of immunoglobulin M (...

During skeletal muscle development, different types of muscle fibers are generated, which express different combinations of muscle-specific gene products. For example, the muscle creatine kinase gene (MCK) is highly expressed in fetal but not embryonic myotubes. We performed transient transfections of CAT reporter constructs, driven by the MCK promoter with variable lengths of 5'-flanking seque...

Intermicrovillar areas and apical vesicles characterized by an extensive clathrin coat can be identified in some epithelial cell types. We describe a 280-kD protein, characteristic of these areas in the proximal tubule brush border and epithelial cells of the visceral yolk sac. When injected to 9-d pregnant rats, mAbs to the 280-kD protein regularly induced fetal resorption and/or malformations...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to investigate the role of 11beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenases (11HSD1 and 11HSD2) in determining the fetal concentration of glucocorticoids. METHODS The expression patterns for mRNA abundance, protein level, and enzyme activities of placental and fetal 11HSD1 and 11HSD2 were assessed from embryonic day 13 (E13) to day 21 (E21; term E22). The transpl...