Expression of Vitamin D Receptor in Seminal Vesicles of Cholesterol Formula Mice.

OBJECTIVES: Genomic function of vitamin D receptor (VDR) indicates spermatogenesis that is important for in male reproductive organ authors evaluated the VDR expression in seminal vesicles with high cholesterol (HC) formula diet rat, because there is no report about relationship or difference in VDR in seminal vesicles between HC and control. METHODS: Male C57BL/6 mice aged 5 weeks were raised for 13 weeks. After one week of adaptation-period, they were fed different diet on normal AIN-93G diet, or HC diet containing 2% cholesterol for 12 weeks. The antibodies used were rabbit anti-VDR primary polyclonal. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in VDR reactivity in seminal vesicles, body weight of rat and weight of seminal vesicles between HC group and normal control group. CONCLUSION: Our data give the no difference in expression of VDR of seminal vesicles rat between HC formula diet and normal AIN-93G diet. But we confirmed the VDR expression in seminal vesicles.

Neutral sphingomyelinase and breast cancer research.

Our understanding of the functions of neutral sphingomyelinase (N-SMase) signaling has advanced over the past decade. In this review, we focus on the roles and regulation of N-SMase 1, N-SMase 2, N-SMase 3, an enzyme that generates the bioactive lipid ceramide through the hydrolysis of the membrane lipid sphingomyelin. A large body of work has now implicated N-SMase 2 in a diverse set of cellular functions, physiological processes, and disease pathologies. We focus on different aspects of this enzyme's regulation from transcriptional, post-translational, and biochemical. Furthermore, we expected N-SMase involvement in cellular processes including inflammatory signaling, cell growth, apoptosis, and tumor necrosis factor which in turn play important roles in pathologies such as cancer metastasis, variable disease, and other organ system disorders. Lastly, we examine avenues where targeted N-SMase inhibition may be clinically beneficial in disease scenarios.

Effective projection theory in a correlated electron system.

We propose an efficient method for nonperturbative calculation of Green's function in a correlated electron system. The key idea of the method is to project out irrelevant operators having zero norm in the ground state, which we refer to as effective projection theory. We apply the method to a mesoscopic Anderson model and show that for a given wavefunction ansatz, equations of motion can be closed only by relevant operators, allowing easy calculation of the zero-temperature Green's function. It turns out that the resulting Green's functions reproduce exact limits of both weak and strong interactions. The accuracy is also verified for small systems by comparison with exact diagonalization results, revealing that effective projection theory captures the essential correlated features in the entire regime of interactions.