Publications by authors named "A Okubo"

Acute kidney injury (AKI), typically caused by ischemia, is a common clinical complication with a poor prognosis. Although proteinuria is an important prognostic indicator of AKI, the underlying causal mechanism remains unclear. In vitro studies suggest that podocytes have high ATP demands to maintain their structure and function, however, analyzing their ATP dynamics in living kidneys has been technically challenging.

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Background: Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is a challenging primary liver cancer with a poor prognosis, especially in unresectable cases. Traditional palliative irradiation is limited in reducing liver doses. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and toxicity of respiratory-gated proton beam therapy without fiducial markers for intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The text discusses advancements in gene function analysis using gene knockout methods in mice, particularly highlighting the limitations of traditional conditional gene knockout strategies that may take too long to observe phenotypes due to the stability of target proteins.
  • - A new technique using an improved auxin-inducible degron system, AID2, allows for rapid and reversible protein knockdown through a simple injection, which can lead to observable effects within hours rather than days.
  • - The researchers developed several specific mouse lines to utilize the AID2 system and successfully demonstrated the effective depletion of an endogenous protein, DCP2, using gene editing, resulting in similar phenotypes to those seen in traditional knockout models.
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ATP depletion plays a central role in the pathogenesis of kidney diseases. Recently, we reported spatiotemporal intracellular ATP dynamics during ischemia reperfusion (IR) using GO-ATeam2 mice systemically expressing an ATP biosensor. However, observation from the kidney surface did not allow visualization of deeper nephrons or accurate evaluation of ATP synthesis pathways.

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This study aimed to evaluate visual function and perform multimodal imaging on patients with focal choroidal excavation without any chorioretinal disease (idiopathic focal choroidal excavation [iFCE]). Seventeen eyes of 15 patients with iFCE (8 men, 7 women; mean ± standard deviation age, 56.0 ± 10.

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