BACKGROUND The down-regulation of the cough reflex in patients with aspiration pneumonia can involve both cortical facilitatory pathways for cough and medullary reflex pathways. In order to study the possible involvement of the supramedullary system in the down-regulation of cough reflex, we evaluated the urge-to-cough in patients with aspiration pneumonia. METHODS Cough reflex sensitivity an...

Escherichia coli ribonuclease P (RNase P), a ribonucleoprotein complex which primarily functions in tRNA biosynthesis, is composed of a catalytic RNA subunit, M1 RNA, and a protein cofactor, C5 protein. The fluorescence emission spectrum of the single tryptophan residue-containing C5 protein exhibits maxima at 318 nm and 332 nm. Based on a comparison of the emission spectra of wild-type C5 prot...

Many of the cytotoxic substrates of the multidrug transporter are organic cations. Cimetidine, procainamide, and tetraethylammonium bromide were used in a Chinese hamster ovary model of multidrug resistance, to study handling of noncytotoxic cationic transport probes. Cimetidine and procainamide, but not tetraethylammonium, accumulated to a greater extent (5-fold) in the sensitive CHOAUXB1 (AB)...

We have previously demonstrated that C5-deficient A/J and recombinant congenic BcA17 mice suffer from cardiac dysfunction when infected with C. albicans blastospores intravenously. During these studies we had observed that, even in the control un-infected state, BcA17 hearts displayed alterations in gene expression that have been associated with pathological cardiac hypertrophy in comparison to...

The ground state reaction path for formation of the pyrimidine hydrates was calculated using a nudged elastic band (NEB) approach, combined with a calculation of the transition state, and implemented using a numerical basis set in the density functional theory (DFT) code DMol(3). The model systems used for study consist of 1-methyl pyrimidines with a H2O molecule as the reactant, and the corres...

DNA of 3 unrelated individuals carrying the human plasma butyrylcholinesterase C5 variant (CHE2) was isolated from white blood cells. Southern blot patterns of DNA restriction fragments probed with each of the 4 butyrylcholinesterase exons provided evidence that the production of C5 is not directed by a second butyrylcholinesterase gene. This finding supports the suggestion that the C5 variant ...

We use the theory of flag algebras to find new upper bounds for several small graph and hypergraph Ramsey numbers. In particular, we prove the exact values R(K− 4 ,K − 4 ,K − 4 ) = 28, R(K8, C5) = 29, R(K9, C6) = 41, R(Q3, Q3) = 13, R(K3,5,K1,6) = 17, R(C3, C5, C5) = 17, and R(K− 4 ,K − 5 ; 3) = 12, and in addition improve many additional upper bounds.

In view of the industrial importance high-grade unsaturated ether (UE) and inconvenience acquiring compound, herein, a series low-cost Al-Ni-P catalysts in robust AlPO4/Ni2P structure possessing novel bi-functional catalytic features (hydrogenation activation acid catalysis) were innovated, testified to be efficient for directly synthesizing UE with superior yield up 97% from selective hydrogen...

The C5 convertase of the classical complement pathway is a complex enzyme consisting of three complement fragments, C4b, C2a, and C3b. Previous studies have elucidated functional roles of each subunit (4, 6, 7), but little is known about how the subunits associate with each other. In this investigation, we studied the nature of the classical C5 convertase that was assembled on sheep erythrocyte...