In our present studies, we evaluated the role of the submandibular glands (SMG) on plasma inactive renin (PIR) releasing mechanisms in rats using some agents which are known to stimulate plasma active renin (PAR) release. The results were analyzed between sialoadenectomized (SX) and sham-operated (control: C) rats. Twenty-four h after the operation, PAR releasing agents, furosemide (FRO) 2.5 mg...

The immunoglobulin-like receptors provide positive and negative regulation of immune cells upon recognition of various ligands, thus enabling those cells to respond properly to extrinsic stimuli. Murine paired immunoglobulin-like receptor (PIR)-A and PIR-B, a typical receptor pair of the immunoglobulin-like receptor family, are expressed on a wide range of cells in the immune system, such as B ...

Activated mature T cells induce various inhibitory receptors implicated in maintaining peripheral tolerance in response to the trans-acting ligands. Interestingly, paired Ig-like receptor (PIR)-B, an inhibitory MHC class I receptor on B cells and myeloid cells, could be involved in regulating early T cell development because epitope for PIR is detected on pre-thymic T/NK progenitors but not on ...

BACKGROUND Public involvement in research (PIR) can improve research design and recruitment. Less is known about how PIR enhances the experience of participation and enriches the data collection process. In a study to evaluate how UK care homes and primary health-care services achieve integrated working to promote older people's health, PIR was integrated throughout the research processes. OB...

For any critical information services, there are two fundamental challenges: the protection of users’ privacy and the provision of highly available services. Several schemes for private information retrieval (PIR) were proposed to protect users’ privacy when sensitive information stored in (remote) database servers is accessed. However, all the existing PIR schemes are based on a simple honest-...

It was recently shown by Fazeli et al. that the storage overhead of a traditional t-server private information retrieval (PIR) protocol can be significantly reduced using the concept of a t-server PIR code. In this work, we show that a family of tserver PIR codes (with increasing dimensions and blocklengths) can be constructed from an existing t-server PIR code through lengthening by a single i...

We present a two-round argument system for NP languages with polylogarithmic communication complexity. We introduce a novel property of private information retrieval (PIR) schemes, that we call database-awareness. We construct a concrete database-aware PIR scheme and build our argument system by combining a database-aware PIR scheme with a probabilistically checkable proof system (PCP). Dwork e...

Given a database, the private information retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a user to make queries to several servers and retrieve a certain item of the database via the feedbacks, without revealing the privacy of the specific item to any single server. Classical models of PIR protocols require that each server stores a whole copy of the database. Recently new PIR models are proposed with coding ...

Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), a novel class of small non-coding RNAs, were first discovered in germline cells and are thought to silence transposons in spermatogenesis. Recently, piRNAs have also been identified in somatic tissues, and aberrant expression of piRNAs in tumor tissues may be implicated in carcinogenesis. However, the function of piR-823 in colorectal cancer (CRC) remains unclear...

The hallmark of high-risk human papillomavirus (HR-HPV)-related carcinogenesis is E6 and E7 oncogene overexpression. The aim of this work was to characterize epithelial oral and cervical cancer cells that express HR-HPV E6 and E7 oncoproteins. Transcriptomic assay using DNA microarrays revealed that PIR gene expression was detected in oral cells in an HR-HPV E6/E7-dependent manner. In addition,...