A series of recent articles have examined the genomes and epigenomes of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines. The results appear discouraging for the clinical future of iPS cells, but researchers don’t seem worried. In August 2006, Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka reported that just four specific factors were sufficient to convert a fully differentiated adult cell into a pluripotent...

BACKGROUND Given the usefulness of rats as an experimental system, an efficient method for generating rat induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells would provide researchers with a powerful tool for studying human physiology and disease. Here, we report direct reprogramming of rat neural precursor (NP) cells and rat embryonic fibroblasts (REF) into iPS cells by retroviral transduction using either t...

BACKGROUND Cordyceps cicadae is known as Jin Chan Hua in Traditional Chinese Medicine and known to possess different pharmacological activities. Presently, it was collected from the wild and isolated. Mycelial culture was optimized for extraction of polysaccharides under submerged culture conditions. Besides antioxidant, antibacterial activities of extracted polysaccharides were tested for firs...

The DEAD box helicase DDX3 assembles IPS-1 (also called Cardif, MAVS, or VISA) in non-infected human cells where minimal amounts of the RIG-I-like receptor (RLR) protein are expressed. DDX3 C-terminal regions directly bind the IPS-1 CARD-like domain as well as the N-terminal hepatitis C virus (HCV) core protein. DDX3 physically binds viral RNA to form IPS-1-containing spots, that are visible by...

Performance in visual quantification tasks shows two characteristic patterns as a function of set size. A precise subitizing process for small sets (up to four) was contrasted with an approximate estimation process for larger sets. The spatial arrangement of elements in a set also influences visual quantification performance, with frequently perceived arrangements (e.g., dice patterns) being fa...

Background: Local ischemia is the main pathological performance in osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH). There is currently no effective therapy to promote angiogenesis in the femoral head. Recent studies revealed that exosomes secreted by induced pluripotent stem cell-derived mesenchymal stem cells (iPS-MSC-Exos) have great therapeutic potential in ischemic tissues, but whether they could ...

Introduction: Humans engage in Interpersonal Synchrony (IPS) as they synchronize their own actions with that of a social partner over time. When humans engage in imitation/IPS behaviors, multiple regions in the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices are activated including the putative Mirror Neuron Systems (Iacoboni, 2005; Buxbaum et al., 2014). In the present study, we compared fNIRS-based ...

Maintaining induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells in an undifferentiated, self-renewing state during long-term cultivation is, at present, a major challenge. We previously showed that human amniotic epithelial cells (HuAECs) were able to provide a good source of feeder cells for mouse and human embryonic or spermatogonial stem cells; however, the epigenetic mechanisms have not been elucidated. I...

Idiopathic pneumonia syndrome (IPS) is a fatal non-infectious respiratory complication that develops after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). Because of the poor prognosis of post-HSCT patients with IPS requiring mechanical ventilatory support, performing extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) has been regarded as relatively contraindicated in these patients. A tumor necrosis f...

BACKGROUND Interpersonal functioning is a key determinant of psychological well-being, and interpersonal problems (IPs) are common among individuals with psychiatric disorders. However, IPs are rarely formally assessed in clinical practice or within cognitive behavior therapy research trials as predictors of treatment attrition and outcome. The main aim of this study was to investigate the rela...