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 (...

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...

Let P be a set of n points in general and convex position in the plane. Let Dn be the graph whose vertex set is the set of all line segments with endpoints in P , where disjoint segments are adjacent. The chromatic number of this graph was first studied by Araujo et al. [CGTA, 2005]. The previous best bounds are 3n 4 ≤ χ(Dn) < n − √ n 2 (ignoring lower order terms). In this paper we improve the...

OBJECTIVES: A “dip” in the stable nitrogen isotope ratios (dN) of subadults in the late weaning/early post-weaning phase of growth and development has been observed. Speculatively, this is the mechanism of positive nitrogen balance operating among rapidly growing subadults. An alternate hypothesis for dN dips is that during weaning, subadults eat lower-N foods than adults. METHODS: This study e...

For every n ∈ N, there is a straight-line drawing Dn of a planar graph on n vertices such that in any crossing-free straight-line drawing of the graph, at most O(n) vertices lie at the same position as in Dn. This improves on an earlier bound of O( √ n) by Goaoc et al. [6].