We thank Polesel et al for their comments on our study (1) and agree that the relation between obesity and cardiometabolic risk factors is modulated by comorbidities and/or by medications for treating chronic diseases. In this context, as rightly pointed out, sleep disorders are known to be associated with cardiometabolic abnormalities, and because sleep-disordered breathing is more common in o...

M-currents are K+ currents generated by members of the KCNQ family of K+ channels (Wang et al., 1998). However, in some cells, M-like currents may be contaminated by members of other K+ channel gene families, such as the erg family (Meves et al., 1999; Selyanko et al., 1999). In the present experiments, we have used the acute expression of pore-defective mutants of KCNQ3 (DN-KCNQ3) and Merg1a (...

We have employed the nearly 4;r-calorimetric coverage of the E877 apparatus in order to determine flow in different regions of pseuderapidity from the measured t r ans verse energy in Au+Au collisions at 11.4 A.GeV/c. Signatures for the side-splash in the reaction plane at forward and backward rapidities have been established. Indications of a non-zero eccentricity of particles in the reaction ...

The approximate number system (ANS) is the hypothesized cognitive mechanism that allows adults, infants, and animals to enumerate large sets of items approximately. Researchers usually assess the ANS by having subjects compare two sets and indicate which is larger. Accuracy or Weber fraction is taken as an index of the acuity of the system. However, as Clayton et al. (2015) have highlighted, th...

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of kidney diseases including diabetic nephropathy (DN); however, the mechanism is poorly understood. Wang et al. unravel the changes in expression of various HDACs in DN and demonstrate that HDAC4 specifically contributes to podocyte injury in DN. HDAC4 deacetylates STAT1 to suppress autophagy, an essential cellular process f...

Positive selection in the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) env gene has been demonstrated by comparisons of the abundance of nonsynonymous (dn) and synonymous (ds) pairwise variability in the DNA sequence (Bonhoeffer, Holmes, and Nowak 1995; Seibert et al. 1995; Yamaguchi and Gojobori 1997). An increase in dn above the neutral expectation of dn # ds provides an unambiguous indication...

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is one of the major complications of type 2 diabetes and is associated with coronary disease. Nephrin, a protein mainly expressed in glomeruli, is decreased in DN and other kidney diseases. Since insulin levels are misregulated in type 2 diabetes, a possible connection between DN and its decreased nephrin expression could be the presence of regulatory elements responsi...

Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) function has been assessed in several muscular dystrophies. In the last two decades it has been recognized a significant relationship between ANS and cardiac mortality (Palladino et al., 2008). Cardiovascular ANS is frequently studied by using cardiovascular autonomic reflex tests and spectral analysis of heart rate in time and frequency domain (Ewing and Clarke, ...