Comparison of patients with Behçet's disease in the 1980s and 1990s.

Objective: To compare clinical findings in patients with Behçet's disease (BD) seen in 2 different decades (1980s and 1990s) to determine if there has been a shift toward the appearance of less severe disease.

Design: Retrospective, comparative case series.

Participants: Two hundred forty patients with uveitis caused by BD who had their first visit and at least a 4-month follow-up at the uveitis clinic of University of Tokyo Hospital between January 1980 and December 1999 were enrolled.

Cytokine profiles of aqueous humor and graft in orthotopic mouse corneal transplantation.

Background: Cytokine profile is a key in understanding the mechanisms of allograft rejection. Cytokine expression in the aqueous humor and the correlation between the aqueous humor cells and corneal infiltrating cells are not fully understood in corneal transplantation.

Methods: Orthotopic mouse corneal transplantation was performed using BALB/c (H2d) mice as recipients, and C3H/He (H2k) and BALB/c mice as donors for allografts and isografts, respectively.

The stabilizing residues and the functional domains in the hyperthermophilic V-ATPase of Desulfurococcus.

To clarify a universal mechanism of the intramolecular rotation of ATP-synthase, an operon encoding a stable, ancestral ATPase was cloned from a heterotrophic archaeum Desulfurococcus strain SY. The operon of about 7 kbp contained genes E, C, G, A, B and D encoding subunits with predicted molecular weights of 23,217, 41,659, 11,499, 65,476, 52,295, and 24,897, respectively. The sequence was compared with that of Na-ATPase of Enterococcus hirae, A-ATPase of Halobacterium salinarium, V-ATPase of Methanosarcina mazei, and ATP synthase of Methanococcus jannaschii, which are homologous.

Genes of human ATP synthase: their roles in physiology and aging.

The reaction of ATP synthase (F0F1) is the final step in oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS). Although OXPHOS has been studied extensively in bacteria, no tissue-specific functions nor bioenergetic disease, such as mitochondrial encephalomyopathy and aging occur in these organisms. Recent developments of the Human Genome Project will become an important factor in the study of mammalian bioenergetics.