BACKGROUND Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are persistent organic environmental contaminants and known endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Previous studies demonstrated that developmental exposure to the weakly estrogenic PCB mixture Aroclor 1221 (A1221) in Sprague-Dawley rats altered sexual development, adult reproductive physiology and body weight. The current study tested the hypothesis ...

background and aims: the e2f family of transcription factors is encoded by at least eight genes, e2f1-8. these proteins are important targets of the retinoblastoma protein (rb) contributed in regulation of transcription, cell cycle and apoptosis. the aim of this study was to investigate the expression levels of e2f protein family including e2f1, e2f2, e2f7, e2f8 and rb1 in the lineage negative ...

The analysis of genetic variation, in the nucleotide sequences of mitochondrial DNA, provides unique information in tracing of maternal lineage, determination of population diversity, pharmacogenomics and human identification. This study characterizes the HVR-I and II sequence polymorphism in 80 tribal individuals, belonging to the Austro-Asiatic linguistic family of Chotanagpur plateau, India....

Cold-climate reptiles show three kinds of adaptation to provide warmer incubation regimes for their developing embryos: maternal selection of hot nest sites; prolonged uterine retention of eggs; and increased maternal basking during pregnancy. These traits may evolve sequentially as an oviparous lineage invades colder climates. To compare the thermal consequences of these adaptations, I measure...

We describe a case of asymptomatic human parvovirus B19 infection during pregnancy that led to hydrops fetalis and foetal death. The diagnosis was confirmed by the presence of parvovirus B19-specific IgM antibodies in the maternal serum and the pathognomonic findings, which showed intranuclear eosinophilic viral inclusions and margination of chromatin in foetal cells of haemopoietic lineage. De...

Asymmetric segregation of maternally-encoded proteins is essential to cell fate determination during early cell divisions of the Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) embryo, but little is known about the patterning of maternal transcripts inside somatic lineages. In the first Chapter of this thesis, by detecting individual mRNA molecules in situ, we measured the densities of the two maternal mRN...

Different subtypes of dendritic cells (DC) influence the differentiation of naíve T lymphocytes into T helper type 1 (Th1) and Th2 effector cells. We evaluated the percentages of DC subtypes in peripheral blood from pregnant women (maternal blood) and their cord blood compared to the peripheral blood of healthy non pregnant women (control). Circulating DC were identified by flow cytometry as li...

Defects in placental development lead to pregnancies at risk for miscarriage and intrauterine growth retardation and are associated with preeclampsia, a leading cause of maternal death and premature birth. In preeclampsia, impaired placental formation has been associated with alterations in a specific trophoblast lineage, the invasive trophoblast cells. In this study, an RT-PCR Trophoblast Gene...