Circadian clocks are autonomous daily timekeeping mechanisms that allow organisms to adapt to environmental rhythms as well as temporally organize biological functions. Clock-controlled timekeeping involves extensive regulation of rhythmic gene expression. To date, relatively few clock-associated promoter elements have been identified and characterized. In an unbiased search of core clock gene ...

Functional MRI (fMRI) is widely assumed to measure neuronal activity, but no satisfactory mechanism for this linkage has been identified. Here we derived the changes in the energetic component from the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI signal and related it to changes in the neuronal spiking frequency in the activated voxels. Extracellular recordings were used to measure changes in ...

Cyc is a monumental but controversial research eeort for codifying the human consensus knowledge initiated by Doug Lenat in 1984. The human consensus knowledge is meant to be the background knowledge that a human is assumed to possess in order to understand, for example, newspaper articles or encyclopedia entries. The methodology chosen is to enter this knowledge explicitly in a large knowledge...

BACKGROUND Cryptosporidium parvum and Cyclospora cayetanensis are recognised as possible pathogens of traveller's diarrhoea. AIMS To identify the prevalence of C parvum and Cyc cayetanensis in travellers returning from developing countries. PATIENTS Nine hundred and seventy eight stool samples wer taken from 795 patients returning from developing countries. METHODS Microscopy (iron-haemat...

Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) is a multisystemic autoimmune disease with renal involvement being one of the most frequent and serious manifestations of the disease. The aim of the study is to analyze the treatment and renal outcome of patients with lupus nephritis (LN) WHO class III and IV on cyclophosphamide (CYC). We retrospectively identified 41 patients with biopsy proven LN who was gi...

Circadian pacemaker neurons in the Drosophila brain control daily rhythms in locomotor activity. These pacemaker neurons can be subdivided into early or late groups depending on whether rhythms in period (per) and timeless (tim) expression are initiated at the first instar (L1) larval stage or during metamorphosis, respectively. Because CLOCK-CYCLE (CLK-CYC) heterodimers initiate circadian osci...

PURPOSE Little is known about neuronal changes during ageing in the visual system of mice which are increasingly being used as animal models for human visual disorders. METHODS AND RESULTS Measuring the optomotor response to moving gratings, visual acuity of C57BL/6-mice was 0.39 cycles/degree (cyc/deg) until 12 months of age and declined to 0.27 cyc/deg (by 30%) at 26 months. In the visual w...

Since the introduction of combined immunosuppressive therapy with oral cyclophosphamide (CYC) and glucocorticosteroids in the 1970s, the outcome of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-associated vasculitides, for example, in granulomatosis with polyangiitis (Wegener`s), improved dramatically. However, the long-term follow-up of patients treated with CYC plus glucocorticosteroids has revealed hi...

Angiogenesis, or formation of new blood vessels, is crucial to cancer tumor growth. Tumor growth, progression, and metastasis are critically influenced by the production of the pro-angiogenic vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Promising anti-angiogenic drugs are currently available; however, their susceptibilities to drug resistance and long term toxicity are serious impediments to thei...

We evaluated the efficacy and safety of tacrolimus (TAC) combined with corticosteroids in treating patients with idiopathic membranous nephropathy (IMN). One hundred seventy-seven biopsy-proven IMN patients were recruited in this retrospective clinical study. Sixty patients received TAC (target blood concentration of 4-8 ng/mL) and 117 patients received daily cyclophosphamide (CYC, 100 mg) comb...