The process of osteoclastic bone resorption is complex and regulated at multiple levels. The role of osteoclast (OCL) fusion and motility in bone resorption are unclear, with the movement of OCL on bone largely unexplored. RANKL (also known as TNFSF11) is a potent stimulator of murine osteoclastogenesis, and activin A (ActA) enhances that stimulation in whole bone marrow. ActA treatment does no...

Annexin II (AXII), a calcium-dependent phospholipid-binding protein, has been recently found to be an osteoclast (OCL) stimulatory factor that is also secreted by OCLs. In vitro studies showed that AXII induced OCL formation and bone resorption. However, the mechanism of action by which AXII acts as a soluble extracellular protein to induce OCL formation is unknown. In this paper, we demonstrat...

OCL (Object Constraint Language) is the OMG standard language for the precise specification of constraints associated to MOF-compliant models and meta-models. Although OCL has been created with the intention to be a simpler language when compared to traditional formal specification languages, it is common to find specifications containing OCL constraints that are difficult to understand and evo...

This paper reports on a knowledge representation model, OCL-SOP, that formally defines key entities pertinent to clinical laboratory procedures. OCL-SOP provides a formal description of laboratory experimental actions, biochemical entities involved, equipment used, input and output data, and the data processing actions. We developed OCL-SOP in collaboration with domain experts. We demonstrate t...

A complementary DNA expression library derived from marrow samples from myeloma patients was recently screened and human macrophage inflammatory protein-1alpha (hMIP-1alpha) was identified as an osteoclastogenic factor expressed in these samples. hMIP-1alpha enhanced osteoclast (OCL) formation in human marrow cultures and by highly purified OCL precursors in a dose-dependent manner (5-200 pg/mL...

In software modeling, the Object Constraint Language (OCL) is an important tool to specify properties that a model has to satisfy. The design of OCL reflects the structure of MOF-based modeling languages like UML and the tight integration results in an intuitive usability. However, OCL allows to express properties in the context of the current state of an instance model only but not with respec...