Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a chronic autoimmune disease, featuring fibrosis in multiple organs. The serum from SSc patients contain inflammatory mediators, contributing to SSc pathogenesis and could be used to develop cell culture models. Here, we compared the fibrotic effects of serum samples from SSc patients with TGFβ1 on human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs). HDF cells were cultured in four diff...

Background Background: Mammalian spermatogenesis is regulated through paracrine and endocrine activity, specific cell signaling, and local control mechanisms. These highly specific signaling interactions are effectively absent upon placing testicular cells into two-dimensional primary culture. The specific changes that occur between key cell types and involved spermatogenesis signaling pathways...

s:3115:"Background: During reproductive life, the human endometrium undergoes around 500 cycles of growth, breakdown and regeneration. This outstanding regenerative capability is the basis for cyclic endometrial preparation and its dysfunction is involved in pathological disorders. Endometrial regeneration is mediated by the existence of a specialized endometrial stem cell (SC) population recen...

Background Male infertility management has made significant progress during the past three decades, especially after the introduction of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) in 1992. However, many boys and men still suffer from primary testicular failure due to acquired or genetic causes. New and novel treatments are needed to address these issues. Spermatogenesis originates from spermatogon...

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a connective tissue disease that is characterized by tissue fibrosis, microvasculopathy, and autoimmunity. Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is a common complication of SSc and is one of the frequent causes of mortality in SSc. Although the exact etiology of SSc remains unknown, clinical and experimental investigations have suggested that genetic and environmental fact...

Skin dryness and thickening are hallmarks of systemic sclerosis (SSc) disease. Aquaporins (AQPs) are plasma membrane proteins that transport glycerol and water, resulting in water retention and skin hydration. Expression of AQPs has been evaluated in human normal skin. However, expression of these proteins in SSc dermal fibroblasts has not yet been reported. The aim of this study was to assess ...

It is well known that microRNAs play a very important role in regulating reprogramming, pluripotency and cell fate decisions. Porcine induced pluripotent stem cells (piPSCs) are now available for studying the pluripotent regulation network in pigs. Two types of piPSCs have been derived from human and mouse embryonic stem cell (ESC) culture conditions: hpiPSCs and mpiPSCs, respectively. The hpiP...

The creation of a gold standard corpus (GSC) is a very laborious and costly process. Silver standard corpus (SSC) annotation is a very recent direction of corpus development which relies on multiple systems instead of human annotators. In this paper, we investigate the practical usability of an SSC when a machine learning system is trained on it and tested on an unseen benchmark GSC. The main f...

The endometrium is recognized for its remarkable regenerative and remodeling capacity. Every month this hormonally regulated organ undergoes cycles of growth (from 0.5-2 to 7 mm), regression and shedding of two-third of the tissue, leading to its monthly renewal that occurs ∼400 times in a woman's reproductive lifetime. Several groups have suggested the existence of a human endometrial somatic ...