Neuroprotective Effects of Ischemic Preconditioning on Global Brain Ischemia through Up-Regulation of Acid-Sensing Ion Channel 2a

Transient forebrain or global ischemia induces cell death in vulnerable CA1 pyramidal neurons. A brief period of ischemia, i.e., ischemic preconditioning, affords CA1 neurons robust protection against a subsequent, more prolonged ischemic challenge. Using the four-vessel occlusion model, we established an ischemic preconditioning model in which rodents were subjected to 3 min of sublethal ischemia 48 h before a 15 min lethal ischemia. We showed that preconditioning attenuated the ischemia-induced neural cell death and DNA fragmentation in the hippocampal CA1 region. RT-PCR and western blot analysis showed that preconditioning prior to an ischemic insult significantly increased ASIC 2a mRNA and protein expression in comparison to the ischemic insult alone (p < 0.01). These findings implicate a new role of ASIC 2a on endogenous neuroprotection from ischemic insult

The Construction of a Dictionary for a Two-layer Chinese Morphological Analyzer

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200

Role of extrathyroidal TSHR expression in adipocyte differentiation and its association with obesity

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Obesity is known to be associated with higher risks of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes mellitus. Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSHR) is the receptor for thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH, or thyrotropin), the key regulator of thyroid functions. The expression of TSHR, once considered to be limited to thyrocytes, has been so far detected in many extrathyroidal tissues including liver and fat. Previous studies have shown that TSHR expression is upregulated when preadipocytes differentiate into mature adipocytes, suggestive of a possible role of TSHR in adipogenesis. However, it remains unclear whether TSHR expression in adipocytes is implicated in the pathogenesis of obesity.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In the present study, TSHR expression in adipose tissues from both mice and human was analyzed, and its association with obesity was evaluated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We here showed that TSHR expression was increased at both mRNA and protein levels when 3T3-L1 preadipocytes were induced to differentiate. Knockdown of TSHR blocked the adipocyte differentiation of 3T3-L1 preadipocytes as evaluated by Oil-red-O staining for lipid accumulation and by RT-PCR analyses of PPAR-γ and ALBP mRNA expression. We generated obesity mice (C57/BL6) by high-fat diet feeding and found that the TSHR protein expression in visceral adipose tissues from obesity mice was significantly higher in comparison with the non-obesity control mice (<it>P </it>< 0.05). Finally, the TSHR expression in adipose tissues was determined in 120 patients. The results showed that TSHR expression in subcutaneous adipose tissue is correlated with BMI (body mass index).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Taken together, these results suggested that TSHR is an important regulator of adipocyte differentiation. Dysregulated expression of TSHR in adipose tissues is associated with obesity, which may involve a mechanism of excess adipogenesis.</p

中国語指示詞の文脈指示についての再考--日本語指示詞コソアへの対応と関連して

The aim of this paper is to revise the paper entitled "A study on the anaphora in Chinese demonstrative pronouns" written in 1999, and to make it clear semantically and pragmatically how the Chinese demonstrative pronouns " "and"那"are properly used. Moreover to add how different they are from the corresponding Japanese counterparts "ko", "so" and "a"

Similarity Measure Based on Partial Information of Time Series

Similarity measure of time series is an important subroutine in many KDD applications. Previous similarity models mainly focus on the prominent series behaviors by considering the whole information of time series. In this paper, we address the problem: which portion of information is more suitable for similarity measure for the data collected from a certain field. We propose a model for the retrieval and representation of the partial information in time series data, and a methodology for evaluating the similarity measurements based on partial information. The methodology is to retrieve various portions of information from the raw data and represent it in a concise form, then cluster the time series using the partial information and evaluate the similarity measurements through comparing the results with a standard classification. Experiments on data set from stock market give some interesting observations and justify the usefulness of our approach. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications- dat