Connective tissues support organs and play crucial roles in development, homeostasis and fibrosis, yet our understanding of their formation is still limited. To gain insight into the molecular mechanisms of connective tissue specification, we selected five zinc-finger transcription factors - OSR1, OSR2, EGR1, KLF2 and KLF4 - based on their expression patterns and/or known involvement in connect...

Pectus excavatum, the most frequent congenital chest wall deformity, may be rarely observed as a sole deformity or as a sign of an underlying connective tissue disorder. To date, only few studies have described correlations between this deformity and heritable connective tissue disorders such as Marfan, Ehlers-Danlos, Poland, MASS (Mitral valve prolapse, not progressive Aortic enlargement, Skel...

Acupuncture meridians traditionally are believed to constitute channels connecting the surface of the body to internal organs. We hypothesize that the network of acupuncture points and meridians can be viewed as a representation of the network formed by interstitial connective tissue. This hypothesis is supported by ultrasound images showing connective tissue cleavage planes at acupuncture poin...

A great deal af the current interest in the connective tissues has been focused on the extracellular components of these tissues, particularly collagen and the mucopolysaccharides. Alterations in the amounts and in the physical and chemical properties of these extracellular components have been implicated as contributing factors in many abnormal and diseased states such as rheumatoid arthritis,...

Reported mechanical properties of orbital connective tissue and fat have been too sparse to model strain-stress relationships underlying biomechanical interactions in strabismus. We performed rheological tests to develop a multi-mode upper convected Maxwell (UCM) model of these tissues under shear loading. From 20 fresh bovine orbits, 30 samples of connective tissue were taken from rectus pulle...

Twenty six children with overlapping features of more than one connective tissue disorder are reported. The median age of onset was 9.5 years and median duration of follow up 7.5 years. Common presenting symptoms included arthritis, tenosynovitis. Raynaud's phenomenon, myositis, and rashes. At follow up 14 patients had developed sclerodermatous skin changes, but significant systemic involvement...

The traditional way to study the properties of visual neurons is to measure their responses to visually presented stimuli. A second way to understand visual neurons is to characterize their responses in terms of activity elsewhere in the brain. Understanding the relationships between responses in distinct locations in the visual system is essential to clarify this network of cortical signaling ...

When two nominal constituents are in a relation of dependency in the Bantu languages, the syntactically dependent constituent is usually introduced by a relator. In Bantu studies this relator is called connective (also associative, genitive or connexive) element (or pronoun, clitic, prefix, marker or particle). The order is HEAD (R1) RELATOR (REL) DEPENDENT (R2). R1 and R2 are short for first a...

A method to extend the Hough transform (HT) to detect connectivity by ordered accumulation is reported. The method is applied to the dynamic combinatorial HT [6]. A focus of attention mechanism is also reported. Our connective HT with focus of attention reduces the computational complexity of the DCHT and increases the S/N ratio of the peak in its accumulator. It may be regarded as a principled...

A polypeptide which induces hypermetabolism in normal synovial fibroblasts in tissue culture is described. The metabolic changes induced included a marked increase in hyaluronate formation, lactate formation and glucose uptake; formation of soluble and fibrous collagen was depressed. An assay method is presented which permits quantitative comparisons of samples for connective tissue activating ...