Association of the vascular endothelial damage and estrogen, progesterone / 대한산부인과학회지

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study were to examine the serum level of estradiol, estriol, progesterone, oxidized LDL in preeclamtic patients and to evaluate the protective effects of estrogen and progesterone against lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC) induced cell death in Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). METHODS: We analysed the serum level of estradiol, estriol, progesterone, oxidized LDL in patients with preeclampsia and control. We used LPC to induce cell death in HUVECs. For cytotoxic assay, we did LDL assay for cell death and Resazurin assay for cell viability. HUVECs were exposed to various concentrations of LPC, LPC+estrogen, LPC+progesterone and we did cytotoxic assay. RESULTS: The serum estradiol, estriol were lower in the preeclamptic patients (P<0.05). Oxidized LDL were higher in the preeclamptic patients(P<0.05). LPC induced cell death in a concentration-dependant manner. Estrogen or progesterone inhibited LPC-induced cell death in a concentration-dependant manner (P<0.05). CONCLUSION: Estrogen and progesterone attenuated LPC-induced cytotoxicity. The results suggest that Oxidized LDL induced endothelial damage in preeclampsia may be induced by low serum estradiol, estriol and progesterone levels and prevented by estrogen and progesterone addition.

Prenatal diagnosis by isolation of fetal nucleated RBCs in maternal peripheral blood / 대한산부인과학회지

OBJECTIVE: To identify prenatal fetal sex and chromosomal aneuploidies by FISH using isolation of fetal nucleated RBCs. METHODS: peripheral blood samples was collected from 37 women between 11 and 24 weeks of gestation. we tried to enrich nucleated RBCs morphologically by Kleihaur-Betke staining after double gradient centrifugation and magnetic activating cell sorting (MACS) from maternal blood. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analyses with CEP X and CEP Y probes for K-B positive nucleated RBCs were performed to detect whether fetal cells were existed among nucleated RBCs by observation of sex chromosomes. RESULTS: The average number of K-B positive nucleated RBCs separated from 10ml of maternal blood was 17.3 (+/-17.2) and the maximum number of nucleated RBCs was 54. We observed FISH signals in nucleated RBCs separated from 18 pregnant women, and Y probe signals were observed in 67.3% of nucleated RBCs separated from 10 pregnant women. CONCLUSION: We confirmed that separated nucleated fetal RBCs can be used to identify fetal sex and chromosomal aneuploidies by FISH. Since nucleated RBCs from maternal origin were not excluded, further studies are needed to overcome this limitation.

KBUD: The Korea Brain UniGene Database

Human brain EST data provide important clues for our understanding of the molecular biology associated with the function of the normal brain and the molecular pathophysiology with brain disorders. To systematically and efficiently study the function and disorders of the human brain, 45,773 human brain ESTs were collected from 27 human brain cDNA libraries, which were constructed from normal brains and brain disorders such as brain tumors, Parkinson's disease (PD) and epilepsy. An analysis of 45,773 human brain ESTs using our EST analysis pipeline resulted in 38,396 high-quality ESTs and 35,906 ESTs, which were coalesced into 8,246 unique gene clusters, showing a significant similarity to known genes in the human RefSeq, human mRNAs and UniGene database. In addition, among 8,246 gene clusters, 4,287 genes (52%) were found to contain full-length cDNA clones. To facilitate the extraction of useful information in collected these human brain ESTs, we developed a user-friendly interface system, the Korea Brain Unigene Database (KBUD). The KBUD web interface allows access to our human brain data through three major search modes, the BioCarta pathway, keywords and BLAST searches. Each result when viewed in KBUD offers comprehensive information concerning the analyzed human brain ESTs provided by our data as well as data linked to various other public databases. The user-friendly developed KBUD, the first world-wide web interface for human brain EST data with ESTs of human brain disorders as well as normal brains, will be a helpful system for developing a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the normal brain well as brain disorders. The KBUD system is freely accessible at http://kugi.kribb.re.kr/KU/cgi-bin/brain.pl.