L-Carnitine protects against tacrolimus-induced renal injury by attenuating programmed cell death via PI3K/AKT/PTEN signaling.

Reducing immunosuppressant-related complications using conventional drugs is an efficient therapeutic strategy. L-carnitine (LC) has been shown to protect against various types of renal injury. In this study, we investigated the renoprotective effects of LC in a rat model of chronic tacrolimus (TAC) nephropathy.

A theoretical study on activation of transcription factor modulated by intracellular Ca2+ oscillations.

This work presents both deterministic and stochastic models of genetic expression modulated by intracellular calcium (Ca2+) oscillations, based on macroscopic differential equations and chemical Langevin equations, respectively. In deterministic case, the oscillations of intracellular Ca2+ decrease the effective Ca2+ threshold for the activation of transcriptional activator (TF-A). The average activation of TF-A increases with the increase of the average amplitude of intracellular Ca2+ oscillations, but decreases with the increase of the period of intracellular Ca2+ oscillations, which are qualitatively consistent with the experimental results on the gene expression in lymphocytes.

A mesoscopic stochastic mechanism of cytosolic calcium oscillations.

Based on a model of intracellular calcium (Ca(2+)) oscillation with self-modulation of inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate signal, the mesoscopic stochastic differential equations for the intracellular Ca(2+) oscillations are theoretically derived by using the chemical Langevin equation method. The effects of the finite biochemical reaction molecule number on both simple and complex cytosolic Ca(2+) oscillations are numerically studied. In the case of simple intracellular Ca(2+) oscillation, it is found that, with the increase of molecule number, the coherence resonance or autonomous resonance phenomena can occur for some external stimulation parameter values.