A study on refurbishment of multi-family houses in Malaysia - housing developed by Kuala Lumpur City Government in the ’80s -

In Asian countries including Malaysia, a lot of new residential areas (; New towns) are developed because of the rapid population increase in urban areas during mass housing era ;60-80’s. The designs of the residential buildings provided to New Towns have been influenced by Western design based on modernism, which has different origin from Asian traditional architectures. Residents living in New Towns refurbish their dwellings in daily basis, and these refurbishments represent gaps between their diversified living requirements and the provided standards on which dwelling design is based. In this study, we carried out investigations on refurbishments by residents for multi-family houses in Kuala Lumpur. Our focus is providing the right and eligible procedures and methodologies to configure sustainable New Town houses considering Malaysian cultural aspects. We extracted three areas from large-scale residential complexes developed during early mass housing era in Kuala Lumpur as investigation targets. Questionnaires were given to the residents, 102 of whom answered them, and 37 of whom agreed photographing insides of the dwellings, sketching their living plans, and hearing their daily lives. 54 among 102 answered they had conducted some refurbishments. Major refurbishments are categorized as follows; installation/removal of walls/dividers, changes on floor/wall surface finishes, expansion to outside, addition of bay windows and window roofs. In Conclusion, ・ Relationship between residents’ ways of living and refurbishments is clarified. Residents’ living activities spread not only inside of dwellings but also to semi-external spaces such as balconies. ・ Various kinds of refurbishments including additions of window roofs and expansions to outside suggest ways how to adjust dwellings to local climate conditions and ways of living. ・ The ways of living and refurbishments show their living needs in semi-external spaces with appropriate air circulation. ・ The housing design in the future should be based on local climate, environments and cultures

Proteolytic release of CD44 intracellular domain and its role in the CD44 signaling pathway

CD44 is a widely distributed cell surface adhesion molecule and is implicated in diverse biological processes. However, the nature of intracellular signaling triggered by CD44 remains to be elucidated. Here, we show that CD44 undergoes sequential proteolytic cleavage in the ectodomain and intracellular domain, resulting in the release of a CD44 intracellular domain (ICD) fragment. Consequently, CD44ICD acts as a signal transduction molecule, where it translocates to the nucleus and activates transcription mediated through the 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol 13-acetate–responsive element, which is found in numerous genes involved in diverse cellular processes. Expression of an uncleavable CD44 mutant as well as metalloprotease inhibitor treatment blocks CD44-mediated transcriptional activation. In search of the underlying mechanism, we have found that CD44ICD potentiates transactivation mediated by the transcriptional coactivator CBP/p300. Furthermore, we show that cells expressing CD44ICD produce high levels of CD44 messenger RNA, suggesting that the CD44 gene is one of the potential targets for transcriptional activation by CD44ICD. These observations establish a novel CD44 signaling pathway and shed new light on the functional link between proteolytic processing of an adhesion molecule at the cell surface and transcriptional activation in the nucleus

jPOSTrepo: an international standard data repository for proteomes

Major advancements have recently been made in mass spectrometry-based proteomics, yielding an increasing number of datasets from various proteomics projects worldwide. In order to facilitate the sharing and reuse of promising datasets, it is important to construct appropriate, high-quality public data repositories. jPOSTrepo (https://repository.jpostdb.org/) has successfully implemented several unique features, including high-speed file uploading, flexible file management and easy-to-use interfaces. This repository has been launched as a public repository containing various proteomic datasets and is available for researchers worldwide. In addition, our repository has joined the ProteomeXchange consortium, which includes the most popular public repositories such as PRIDE in Europe for MS/MS datasets and PASSEL for SRM datasets in the USA. Later MassIVE was introduced in the USA and accepted into the ProteomeXchange, as was our repository in July 2016, providing important datasets from Asia/Oceania. Accordingly, this repository thus contributes to a global alliance to share and store all datasets from a wide variety of proteomics experiments. Thus, the repository is expected to become a major repository, particularly for data collected in the Asia/Oceania region

Validity and Reproducibility of a Self-Administered Food Frequency Questionnaire for the Assessment of Sugar Intake in Middle-Aged Japanese Adults

We evaluated the validity and reproducibility of estimated sugar intakes using a food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) among middle-aged Japanese adults in the Japan Public Health Centre-Based Prospective (JPHC) study. In subsamples of the JPHC study (Cohorts I and II in multiple areas), we computed Spearman’s correlations of FFQ results with urine sugar concentrations and dietary records (DR) for validity; we evaluated correlations between two FFQs for reproducibility. During 1994–1998, participants (Cohort I: n = 27 [men], n = 45 [women]) provided two (spring and fall) 24-h urine samples and completed 7-consecutive-day DR per season (I: n = 99, n = 113; II: n = 168, n = 171) and two FFQs (147 food items) at yearly intervals (I: n = 101, n = 108; II: n = 143, n = 146). Sugar intakes from FFQ were correlated with urinary sugar (de-attenuated correlations: 0.40; 95%CI: 0.19, 0.58). After adjustment for sociodemographic and lifestyle variables, correlations between FFQ and DR for men and women were 0.57 (0.42, 0.69) and 0.41 (0.24, 0.55) (I) and 0.56 (0.44, 0.65) and 0.34 (0.20, 0.47) (II), respectively. Correlations between FFQs for men and women were 0.63 (0.49, 0.73) and 0.55 (0.41, 0.67) (I) and 0.66 (0.55, 0.74) and 0.63 (0.52, 0.72) (II). In conclusion, our study showed moderate FFQ validity and reproducibility for sugar intake evaluation