Purpose: The retinoic acid receptors are expressed from early stages of development in the diverse tissues that make up the vertebrate eye. Their loss has subtle effects on eye development. We adapted sensitive quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping methods to assess consequences of inactivating alleles of the alpha and beta receptors, Rara and Rarb, on eye and retinal development. Rara is of p...

BACKGROUND Serum miRNAs profiles between papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) patients with non-(131)I and (131)I-avid lung metastases are differentially expressed. These miRNAs have to be further validated and the role of these miRNAs in the molecular function level of thyroid cancer cell lines has not been investigated. METHODS Expression levels of six identified miRNAs were assessed via quant...

Like other CNS neurons, mature retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are unable to regenerate their axons after nerve injury due to a diminished intrinsic regenerative capacity. One of the reasons why they lose the capacity for axon regeneration seems to be associated with a dramatic shift in RGCs’ program of gene expression by epigenetic modulation. We recently reported that (1R)-isoPropyloxygenipin (...

To identify novel abnormally methylated genes in early stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), we analyzed the methylation status of 13 genes (ALX1, BCL2, FOXL2, HPP1, MYF6, OC2, PDGFRA, PHOX2A, PITX2, RARB, SIX6, SMPD3 and SOX1) in cancer tissues from 101 cases of stage I NSCLC patients and lung tissues from 30 cases of non-cancerous lung disease controls, using methylation-specific PCR (MSP...

Retinoids seem to act as agents of chemoprevention and differentiation in breast diseases. Their action is mediated by nuclear receptors, retinoic acid receptors (RARa, RARb, RARg) and retinoid X receptors (RXRa, RXRb, RXRg) and modulated by cellular retinol binding proteins (CRBP). There are few published data on CRBP expression. In this study, we evaluated the expression of RARa, b and g and ...

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) flow simulations are extremely expensive in terms of CPU time and memory. In this study, parallel computing and grid adaptation techniques are employed to achieve high efficiency and accuracy in a hybrid unstructured flow solver. However, adaptive local grid refinement/coarsening causes the unequal distribution of workload among the processors at run time. A s...

Acyclic retinoid (ACR), a novel synthetic retinoid, has recently been demonstrated by us to inhibit the in vitro growth of human hepatoma cells, and this effect was associated with decreased expression of cell cycle-related molecules. These results, taken together with previous in vitro and clinical studies with ACR, suggest that this agent may be useful in the chemoprevention and therapy of he...

To define the signal transduction pathway of retinoic acid during inner ear development, we analyzed the expression patterns of transcripts encoding the three retinoic acid receptors (RARa, b, and g) and related them to phenotypes resulting from single or compound inactivation of these nuclear receptors. The expression of all three RARs was observed in the developing mouse otocyst as early as e...

Melanoma genomes contain thousands of alterations including: mutations, copy number alterations, structural aberrations, and methylation changes. The bulk of this variation is stochastic and functionally neutral, with only a small minority representing "drivers" that contribute to the genesis and maintenance of tumors. Drivers are often directly or inversely correlated across tumors, reflecting...

Treatment of pseudoglandular stage fetal lungs in vitro with the pan-retinoic acid receptor (pan-RAR) antagonist, BMS493, reduces retinoic acid receptor beta (Rarb) gene expression within the proximal bronchial tubules and increases explant bud formation. Treatment with retinoic acid (RA) increases Rarb expression and reduces explant bud formation through a signaling mechanism involving RARbeta...