Study of liver cirrhosis over twenty consecutive years in adults in Southern China.

Background: Liver cirrhosis (LC) is a prevalent and severe disease in China. The burden of LC is changing with widespread vaccination of hepatitis B virus (HBV) and antiviral therapy. However, the recent transition in etiologies and clinical features of LC cases requiring hospitalization is unclear.

The p75 neurotrophin receptor regulates cranial irradiation-induced hippocampus-dependent cognitive dysfunction.

Cognitive deficits, characterized by progressive problems with hippocampus-dependent learning, memory and spatial processing, are the most serious complication of cranial irradiation. However, the underlying mechanisms remain obscure. The p75 neurotrophin receptor (p75NTR) is involved in a diverse arrays of cellular responses, including neurite outgrowth, neurogenesis, and negative regulation of spine density, which are associated with various neurological disorders.

Adsorption and separation of proteins by collagen fiber adsorbent.

The separation of proteins is a key step in biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. In the present investigation, the collagen fiber adsorbent (CFA) was exploited as column packing material to separate proteins. Bovine serum albumin (BSA), bovine hemoglobin (Hb) and lysozyme (LYS) that have different isoelectric points (pIs) were selected as model proteins to investigate the separation ability of CFA to proteins.

Molecular cloning and characterization of a matrix metalloproteinase, from Caenorhabditis elegans: employed to identify homologous protein from Angiostrongylus cantonensis.

Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are a class of zinc-binding endopeptidases mainly responsible for degrading extracellular matrix constituent components, which also serve as effectors of leukocyte recruitment, cytotoxicity, cytokine and chemokine processing, and defensin activation involved in multiple mechanisms of immunomodulation. MMPs are a conserved proteolytic enzyme family participating in normal physiological function. In the present study, we have cloned a gene named CEMMP62 from Caenorhabditis elegans, the putative 62-kDa protein that contained 579 residues with MMP-conserved catalytic domain known as ZnMc_MMP and showed high identities with MMPs from other nematodes, and demonstrated that the recombinant CEMMP62 (rCEMMP62) expressed and purified from Escherichia coli could have weak proteolytic activity on swine gelatin; Western blot analysis revealed that sera from BALB/c mice immunized by recombinant protein could recognize excretory-secretary antigens from Angiostrongylus cantonensis third-stage larvae (L3).