UNLABELLED Use of hormonal contraceptives (HC) may influence total plasma concentrations of vitamin D metabolites. A likely cause is an increased synthesis of vitamin D binding protein (VDBP). Discrepant results are reported on whether the use of HC affects free concentrations of vitamin D metabolites. AIM In a cross-sectional study, plasma concentrations of vitamin D metabolites, VDBP, and t...

Improving the early prediction and detection of diabetic nephropathy (DN) remains a great challenge in disease management. The aim of this study was to evaluate the early detection power of urinary vitamin D-binding protein (VDBP) for the diagnosis of DN. Urine samples were obtained from 45 healthy volunteers and 105 diabetic patients with normoalbuminuria (DM group), microalbuminuria (DN1 grou...

The biggest limitation to conventional gas chromatography (GC) is limited peak capacity, making the analysis of complex mixtures a difficult or even impossible task. Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) significantly increases peak capacity and resolution, improves sensitivity and generates structured 3D chromatograms. This is achieved by connecting two columns coated with d...

Compositional asymmetries in circular bacterial chromosomes exist on a large-scale. Using a sliding window to take the average concentration of nucleotides across a length equal to one-half of the chromosome (~2.3 million characters), it is possible to to split the E. Coli genome into two distinct region: one with a bias in C concentration and the other with a bias in G concentration. This geno...

Computational prediction of origin of replication (ORI) has been of great interest in bioinformatics and several methods including GC Skew, Z curve, auto-correlation etc. have been explored in the past. In this paper, we have extended the auto-correlation method to predict ORI location with much higher resolution for prokaryotes. The proposed complex correlation method (iCorr) converts the geno...