Strategies for treating Alzheimer's disease (AD) include therapies designed to decrease senile plaque (SP) formation and/or promote clearance of SPs, but clinical trials of these treatments are limited by the lack of effective methods to monitor changes in plaque burden in the brains of living AD patients. However, because SPs are extracellular deposits of amyloid-beta peptides (Abeta), it may ...

The aim of the present study, was to investigate the involvement of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by detecting changes of ER chaperone protein 78 and ER-resident caspase 12 in the basolateral amygdala after exposure to single prolonged stress (SPS). The established rat model of PTSD was generated by exposure of the animals to SPS. The expression of gluc...

Stiff person syndrome (SPS) is a rare, chronic disorder characterized by painful spasm and stiffness. We investigated the quality of life (QoL) in SPS patients, and identified factors associated with impairment in patients' QoL. Twenty-four SPS patients (10 men, 14 women; mean age +/- S.D., 52.6 +/- 9.5 years) completed the medical outcomes study Short Form health survey (SF-36), the Beck Depre...

This licentiate thesis concerns mathematical modeling and identification of the the human smooth pursuit system (SPS) and the application of the models to motor symptom quantification in Parkinson’s disease (PD). The SPS is a complex neuromuscular system governing smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM), and the task is to keep a moving target in the visual field. Diagnosing and quantifying the dis...

IMPORTANCE Stiff person syndrome (SPS) is a rare neurological disease causing significant functional disability for patients and presenting a therapeutic challenge for clinicians. Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (auto-HSCT) has been used successfully to remit autoimmune-mediated neurological diseases. We report 2 cases of severe SPS treated with auto-HSCT, a novel therapy for...

The function and activity of almost every circuit in the human brain are modified by the signaling peptides (SPs) surrounding the neurons. As the complement of peptides can vary even in adjacent neurons and their physiological actions can occur over a broad range of concentrations, the required figures of merit for techniques to characterize SPs are surprisingly stringent. In this review, we de...

Targeting of proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) usually requires N-terminal signal peptides (SP) of approximately 22 amino acids in length. However, a substantial number of proteins contain exceptionally long SPs of 40 amino acids and more, an example being protein shrew-1/AJAP1. Using shrew-1's SP as example, the NtraC model has been developed by dissecting long SPs into two functional...

Stiff person syndrome (SPS) is a disabling autoimmune central nervous system disorder characterized by progressive muscle rigidity and gait impairment with superimposed painful spasms that involve axial and limb musculature, triggered by heightened sensitivity to external stimuli. Impaired synaptic GABAergic inhibition resulting from intrathecal B-cell-mediated clonal synthesis of autoantibodie...

Sucrose-phosphate synthase (SPS) is one of the key regulatory enzymes in carbon assimilation and partitioning in plants. It plays a crucial role in the production of sucrose in photosynthetic cells. The cloning and expression analysis of a full-length cDNA encoding SPS from tropical epiphytic orchid hybrid Oncidium Goldiana are reported here. The cDNA designated as sps1 is 3820 bp in length wit...

To demonstrate the potential alternative sources of starch used in tablet formulations, starches from taro (TS) and sweet potato (SPS) tubers were prepared with obtained yields of 11.0 and 9.6%, respectively. Both TS and SPS met USP22-NF17 identification and specifications. Their equilibrium moisture contents and gelatinization temperatures were comparable with those of commercial starch, where...