Conditionally immortalized human podocyte cell lines established from urine.

Evidence suggests that loss of podocytes into urine contributes to development of glomerular diseases; shed podocytes are frequently viable and proliferate in culture conditions. To determine the phenotypic characteristics of viable urinary cells derived from human subjects, we established long-term urinary cell culture from two patients with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis and two healthy volunteers, via transformation with the thermosensitive SV40 large T antigen (U19tsA58) together with human telomerase (hTERT). Characterization of arbitrarily selected two clonal cell lines from each human subject was carried out.

The unique role of advanced practice nurses at the National Institutes of Health: Results of a 2006 survey.

Purpose: To characterize the role of advanced practice nurses (APNs), particularly nurse practitioners (NPs), in the practice setting of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a Federal biomedical research facility.

Data Sources: APNs with prescriptive authority employed at the NIH were surveyed using an adaptation of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) "2004 Nurse Practitioner Sample Survey." A total of 56 of 93 surveys were returned (63% response rate), and of these, 54 (96%) were completed by NPs.

Circulating transcriptome reveals markers of atherosclerosis.

Circulating monocytes mediate inflammation in atherosclerosis and may serve as easily accessible reporters of disease. To search for markers of atherosclerosis, we compared the in vivo transcriptomes of monocytes purified from patients undergoing carotid endarterectomy and normal subjects by using the serial analysis of gene expression technique. We selected a subset of differentially expressed monocyte-specific genes and confirmed their expression levels.