Due to its role during meiosis, variations in the PRDM9 nucleotide sequence have been associated with different pathologies of meiotic origin: infertility (Irie et al. 2009), de novo genomic disorders (Berg et al. 2010; Borel et al. 2012), and childhood leukemogenesis (Hussin et al. 2013) (OMIM accession number: 609760). So far, alleles of the PRDM9 zinc finger array have been determined in stu...

THE REPORT FROM Prabhakaran et al., one of the current articles in focus, also a Translational Physiology article (Ref. 5, see p. L20 in this issue), presents a study about the fibrinolytic protease inhibitor, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), in 26 patients with acute lung injury (ALI) (5). Patients with hydrostatic edema (HE; n 25) served as a comparison group. The investigators had ...

The signal requirement for the nuclear import of U1 RNA in somatic cells from different species was investigated by microinjection of both digoxygenin-labeled wild type and mutant U1 RNA molecules and in vitro reconstituted U1 snRNPs. U1 RNA was shown to be targeted to the nucleus by a temperature-dependent process that requires the prior assembly of RNPs from the common proteins and the microi...

AS ONE APPROACH TO ADDRESS T H E N E W INFORMATION needs caused by the increasing amount of available digital data, the notion of knowledge discovery has been developed. Knowledge discovery methods typically attempt to reveal general patterns and regularities in data instead of specific facts, the kind of information that is hardly possible for any human being to find. In this article, a method...

The kidney is one of the most sensitive organs to cadmium-induced toxicity, particularly in conditions long-term oxidative stress. We hypothesized that, transplant recipients, nephrotoxic exposure cadmium represents an overlooked hazard for optimal graft function. To test this, we performed a prospective cohort study and included 672 outpatient recipients with functioning beyond year. median pl...

Current therapy for inflammatory pain includes the peripheral application of opioid receptor agonists. Activation of opioid receptors modulates voltage-gated ion channels, but it is unclear whether opioids can also influence ligand-gated ion channels [e.g., the transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1 (TRPV1)]. TRPV1 channels are involved in the development of thermal hypersensitivity asso...