Pressure ulcers (PUs) are chronic wounds that occur as areas of tissue necrosis that results from external physical compression, shear forces, and friction. Recently, the efficacy of polyvinylidene film dressing (PVFD) for PUs without any agents promoting wound healing has been reported, suggesting that PUs have their own mechanism of spontaneous healing achieved by vascularization, synthesis o...

Constant exposure to bright light induces photoreceptor degeneration and at the same time upregulates the expression of several neurotrophic factors in the retina. At issue is whether the induced neurotrophic factors protect photoreceptors. We used a preconditioning paradigm to show that animals preconditioned with bright light became resistant to subsequent light damage. The preconditioning co...

FGFR2 gene, consisting of at least 21 exons, encodes multiple isoforms due to alternative splicing. FGFR2b and FGFR2c with extracellular three Ig-like domains, transmembrane domain and cytoplasmic tyrosine kinase domain, are representative FGFR2 isoforms almost identical except the latter half of the third Ig-like domain. Exon 9 and 10, corresponding to the latter half of the third Ig-like doma...

Introduction: Embryonic Stem (ES) cells as pluripotent cells derived from the inner cell mass of blastula can differentiate to neural cells in vitro and this property is valuable in studies of neurogenesis and in the generation of donor cells for transplantation. In this regard, the propose of this research, was the study of the role of two important factors in the development of neural syst...

To investigate the role of fibroblast growth factor-2 (basic fibroblast growth factor) in chick limb development, we constructed a replication-defective spleen necrosis virus to ectopically express fibroblast growth factor-2 in stage 20-22 chick limb bud. Because infecting cells in vivo proved to be inefficient, limb bud cells were dissociated, infected in vitro, and then grafted back into host...

Whether assembling proteins onto nanoscale, mesoscopic, or macroscropic material surfaces, maintaining a protein's structure and function when conjugated to a surface is complicated by the high propensity for electrostatic or hydrophobic surface interactions and the possibility of direct metal coordination of protein functional groups. In this study, the assembly of a 1.5 nm CAAKA passivated go...

Cardiac remodeling progresses to heart failure, which represents a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Cardiomyokines, cardiac secreted proteins, may play roles in cardiac remodeling. Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are secreted proteins with diverse functions, mainly in development and metabolism. However, some FGFs play pathophysiological roles in cardiac remodeling as cardiomyokines. FG...

Fibroblast growth factors (fgfs) are widely believed to activate their receptors by mediating receptor dimerization. Here we show, however, that the FGF receptors form dimers in the absence of ligand, and that these unliganded dimers are phosphorylated. We further show that ligand binding triggers structural changes in the FGFR dimers, which increase FGFR phosphorylation. The observed effects d...

background: angiogenesis gene therapy has long been sought as a novel alternative treatment for restoring the blood flow and improving the contractile function of the ischemic heart in selected clinical settings. angiogenic fibroblast growth factor-1 (fgf-1) is a promising candidate for developing a promising gene therapy protocol due to its multipotent ability to stimulate endothelial cell (ec...

Strategies to enhance the capacity of grafted stem/progenitors cells to generate multipotential, proliferative and migrating pools of cells in the postnatal brain could be crucial for structural repair after brain damage. We investigated whether the over-expression of basic fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF-2) in neural progenitor cells (NPCs) could provide a robust source of migrating NPCs for t...