Association of monoaminergic gene polymorphisms in chronic inflammatory pulmonary disease patients with successful smoking cessation.

Background: Albeit smoking cessation has unequivocal health benefits, attempts to quit are not unanimous, even in patient populations at high risk for smoking-related diseases cessation. Allelic variations of enzymes involved in dopamine metabolism are being considered as candidates for nicotine addiction. We set out to assess whether rs4680 G/A and rs2235186 G/A polymorphisms of COMT and MAO-A, respectively are associated with the ability to quit smoking in chronic inflammatory pulmonary disease patients.

[Prognostic significance of invasion in glioblastoma].

Background And Purpose: Glioblastoma is the most common malignant CNS tumor, its surgical removal is hindered by the tumors invasive nature, while current anti-tumor therapies show limited effectiveness - mean overall survival is 16-24 months. Some patients show minimal response towards standard oncotherapy, however there are no routinely available prognostic and predictive markers in clinical practice to identify the background of mentioned differences in prognosis. This research aims to identify the prognostic significance of invasion-related extracellular (ECM) components.

Coagulation FXIII-A Protein Expression Defines Three Novel Sub-populations in Pediatric B-Cell Progenitor Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Characterized by Distinct Gene Expression Signatures.

Leukemic B-cell precursor (BCP) lymphoblasts were identified as a novel expression site for coagulation factor XIII subunit A (FXIII-A). Flow cytometry (FC) revealed three distinct expression patterns, i.e.

Development of an antibody control system using phage display.

While chromatin immunoprecipitation has become a widely-used method in the field of transcription regulation studies, serious limitations connected to the complexity and relatively little standardization of the method serve as obstacles for its use in clinical research. In this paper we introduce a method for developing bacteriophage-based controls for the better standardization of the chromatin immunoprecipitation reactions. Random phage display libraries were selected with ChIP-grade antibodies for several rounds and individual monoclonal phages were isolated.

Gene expression analysis of vascular pathophysiology related to anti-TNF treatment in rheumatoid arthritis.

Objectives: Impaired vascular pathophysiology and increased cardiovascular (CV) mortality are associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). To date, no genomic analysis of RA- and RA treatment-related vascular pathophysiology has been published. In this pilot study, we performed gene expression profiling in association with vascular pathophysiology in RA patients.