BACKGROUND Lactoferrin (Lf), an iron-binding protein present in mammalian secretions, plays important roles in cancer prevention by inducing apoptosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS PC-14 lung adenocarcinoma cells were exposed to bovine Lf (bLf) protein and the expression of caspase-3 and apoptosis protease-activating factor-1 (APAF-1) was assessed. To investigate the molecular mechanism of apoptosis...

The body's early defence in response to trauma, inflammation or infection, the acute phase response, is a complex set of systemic reactions seen shortly after exposure to a triggering event. One of the many components is an acute phase protein response in which increased hepatic synthesis leads to increased serum concentration of positive acute phase proteins. The serum concentration of these a...

RORγt⁺ innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) are crucial players of innate immune responses and represent a major source of interleukin-22 (IL-22), which has an important role in mucosal homeostasis. The signals required by RORγt⁺ ILCs to express IL-22 and other cytokines have been elucidated only partially. Here we showed that RORγt⁺ ILCs can directly sense the environment by the engagement of the acti...

COPD = chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; PEEP = positive end-expiratory pressure. The most frequent reason for admission to an intensive care unit is need for ventilatory assistance. At least, this is my experience over the past 20 years from working in university and county hospitals. Regardless of the illness that provokes respiratory insufficiency, the majority of patients with respirat...

A few of the presented soil behavior models are capable of predicting the triggering and post liquefaction and also shear band mechanism through the soil media. The assessment of earth-dam body behavior as a soil structure made of cohesive soil in core and non-cohesive soil as the core supports, including water interaction at upstream through earthquake upon a multi-line constitutive equations ...

Galaxy interactions/mergers, gravitational instabilities and density waves, such as bars, are frequently invoked to trigger starbursts. These mechanisms have been explored through numerical simulations, with the help of various star formation recipes. Gravitational instabilities are necessary to initiate star formation, but the main trigger might be the gas flows, to provide sufficient fuel in ...

In networked control systems, the advent of eventtriggering strategies in the sampling process has resulted in the usage reduction of network capacities, such as communication bandwidth. However, the aperiodic nature of sampling periods generated by event-triggering strategies has hindered the schedulability of such networks. In this study, we propose a framework to construct a timed safety aut...

While humans possess a ready capacity to view a target (biological or otherwise) as an intentional agent (i.e. the 'intentional stance'), the conditions necessary for spontaneously eliciting these mentalizing processes are less well understood. Although research examining people's tendency to construe the motion of geometric shapes as intentional has done much to illuminate this issue, due to m...

In this issue of Blood, MacQarrie and colleagues show that histidine-rich glycoprotein (a negative acute-phase reactant), inhibits activated factor XII, a clotting protein implicated in inflammation and thrombosis.1 O f the 2 mechanisms for triggering blood clotting, only the tissue factor pathway is essential for normal hemostasis. The other— the contact pathway—appears to have no hemostatic r...

Recently, wireless sensor devices have been widely deployed in various application settings (including environmental research, control systems, etc.). Because of the inherent unreliability of sensor readings, any kind of reasoning in sensor environments needs to carefully account for noise. The key goal of pcet is to build an infrastructure that can automatically infer and reason about the prob...