Hormones play a critical role in regulating tissue function by promoting cell survival, proliferation, and differentiation. Our study explores the influence of endocrine function in regulating metabolism and inflammatory pathways in Keratoconus (KC), which is a corneal thinning disease associated with reduced stromal deposition. KC is known to be a multifactorial disease with an elusive pathoge...

The evapotranspiration / potential evapotranspiration (AET /PET) ratio is traditionally termed as the crop coefficient (Kc) and has been generally used as ecosystem evaporative stress index. In the current hydrology literature, Kc has been widely used as a parameter to estimate crop water demand by water managers but has not been well examined for other types of ecosystems such as forests and o...

Aeromonas infections are the most common bacterial disease of cultured fish in China. In this study, a gram-negative bacillus was isolated from the liver of diseased koi carp (Cyprinus carpio koi), and named strain KC-2. The results of morphological and biochemical tests, as well as phylogenetic analysis derived from 16S rRNA and gyrB sequences indicated that the isolated strain KC-2 was highly...

BACKGROUND Heel stick is the most common painful procedure for preterm infants in neonatal intensive care units. Resultant pain causes adverse physiological effects in major organ systems. Kangaroo Care (KC), involving mother-infant skin-to-skin contact is a promising analgesic for infant pain; however, the effect of KC on the autonomic nervous system's response to pain is unknown. AIM To det...

PURPOSE The objective of this study is to investigate changes in corneal densitometry after accelerated transepithelial corneal collagen cross-linking (ATE-CXL) for patients with progressive keratoconus (KC). METHODS Seventeen progressive KC patients who underwent ATE-CXL (KC group) were examined and compared against 17 non-KC myopes (control group). For the KC group, corneal topography and d...

We report that freshly isolated, unstimulated Kupffer cells (KC) from MRL/lpr female mice in short-term culture spontaneously produce high levels of TNF-alpha. TNF production was first detected in KC cultures at age 6 wk and increased with the age of the mice. Moreover, the levels of spontaneous TNF production by KC directly correlated with the age of the MRL/lpr mice. Although TNF production b...

Oxidized LDL (OxLDL) is composed of many potentially proatherogenic molecules, including oxysterols. Of the oxysterols, 7-ketocholesterol (7-KC) is found in relatively large abundance in OxLDL, as well as in atherosclerotic plaque and foam cells in vivo. Although there is evidence that 7-KC activates endothelial cells, its effect on monocytes is unknown. We tested the hypothesis that 7-KC may i...

KC-Viz is a novel tool for visualizing and navigating ontologies, realised as a plug-in of the NeOn Toolkit. KC-Viz provides a comprehensive set of features to support ontology visualization and navigation, including an innovative mechanism for generating overviews of very large ontologies, which is based on an empirically validated ontology summarization algorithm. In this paper, we present an...

Human KC cell monolayer inoculated with concentraten Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (MPMV) showed syncytia formation within an hour. The cell fusion was blocked by the treatment of the MPMV with neutralizing antiserum. Treatment of the MPVM with beta-propiolactone resulted in the loss of infectivity although KC cell fusion ability of the virus still remained. KC cells inoculated with unconcentrated ...

Fas-Fas ligand (FasL)-dependent pathways exert a suppressive effect on inflammatory responses in immune-privileged organs. FasL expression in hepatic Kupffer cells (KC) has been implicated in hepatic immunoregulation. In this study, modulation of FasL expression of KC by endogenous gut-derived bacterial LPS and the role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as potential mediators of FasL expression ...