Unilateral VATER association.

We describe a case of unilateral "VATER association." In addition to the VATER manifestations, the patient had hemihypoplasia, unilateral congenital paralysis of a leg, and delayed ossification of the femoral head and carpal bones. All of the manifestations involved the left side of the body. The only drug exposure identified was a Chinese herbal medicine taken by the mother during early pregnancy.

Collective singlet excitations and evolution of raman spectral weights in the 2D spin dimer compound SrCu2(BO3)(2)

Raman light scattering of the two-dimensional quantum spin system SrCu2(BO3)(2) shows a rich structure in the magnetic excitation spectrum, including several well-defined bound state modes at low temperature, and a scattering continuum and quasielastic light scattering contributions at high temperature. The key to the understanding of the unique features of SrCu2(BO3)(2) is the presence of strong interactions between well-localized triplet excitations in the network of orthogonal spin dimers realized in this compound.

Distribution of mu-calpain proenzyme in the brain and other neural tissues in the rat.

We raised antibodies against the acetyl N-terminal peptide of the human mu-calpain 80 kDa (80 K) subunit (N-acetyl SEETPVYCT-GVSAQVQKQRARELG) in the rabbit. A specific antibody was purified using N-acetyl SEEITPVYCTGVSAQVQKQ peptide-conjugated Sepharose 4B as an affinity gel support. Epitope analysis revealed that the purified antibody reacted only with mu-calpain N-terminal peptides containing N-acetyl SEETT structure but no reactions occurred with other analogous peptides. Western blot analysis showed that the antibody reacted with both human and rat mu-calpain proenzymes but not with the activated calpains lacking N-terminal peptide. Using this antibody we investigated immunohistochemically the distribution of mu-calpain proenzyme in central and peripheral nervous systems as well as other non-neural tissues in the rat. The proenzyme was detected mainly in neurons both in the central and peripheral nervous tissues, but not in non-neural tissues except for red blood cells. Immunoreaction was stronger in the perikarya and/or in the nuclei than in-the cytoplasm. Specificity of the antibody was verified by an absorption test. In summary, the mu-calpain proenzyme is mainly distributed in the perikarya and/or nuclei or neurons. Our present antibody specific to the N-terminus of the mu-calpain 80 K subunit could serve as a useful tool to detect various functions of mu-calpain as well as the damage in neurons caused by the enzyme.

Emerging symptoms of growing skull fracture after secondary trauma in an adult--case report.

A 20-year-old female presented with dysphasia and slight hemiparesis following a head trauma, who had a non-treated growing skull fracture which had remained asymptomatic for about 18 years, despite an encephalocele in the left parietal region. Neuroimaging demonstrated secondary brain damage and herniated brain resulting in gliosis. Electroencephalography revealed epileptic discharge in the affected region. Dural repair and cranioplasty resolved her neurological deficits. Early corrective surgery should be performed for growing skull fracture to prevent secondary brain damage.

Extradural optic nerve decompression for fibrous dysplasia with a favorable visual outcome.

A 10-year-old boy with progressive left visual disturbance associated with craniobasal fibrous dysplasia underwent left frontotemporal craniotomy. Dysplastic lesions of the sphenoid ridge, orbital roof, anterior clinoid, and ethmoid sinus were removed through an extradural pterional approach and the optic nerve was completely decompressed. His vision was markedly improved postoperatively. Consecutive follow-up studies for 3 years have shown no deterioration of his visual acuity. Early optic nerve decompression is highly recommended to preserve visual function in patients with craniofacial fibrous dysplasia causing visual disturbance.

Non-aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage associated with basilar artery dissection--autopsy case report.

A 60-year-old male presented with subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) of unknown origin and died of peritonitis 2 months after the ictus. Computed tomography on admission revealed localized hemorrhage at the interpedunclar cistern and sedimentation in both posterior horns. Repeat angiography could not detect any aneurysm. Postmortem histological examination revealed disruption of the wall associated with intramural hemorrhage at the top of the basilar artery, and subintimal hemorrhages of the lower basilar artery and the left vertebral artery. Arterial dissection of the vertebrobasilar system may be a cause of SAH of unknown origin including perimesencephalic hemorrhage.

[A state of confusion following cerebral angiography with iopamidol: a case report].

A 59-year-old male in a state of confusion following cerebral angiography with iopamidol was reported. He was admitted to our hospital for right upper monoparesis. MRI demonstrated multiple cerebral infarction. The patient had undergone angiographies with iopamidol, of which a total of 100 ml had been used. After the examination, the patient showed perseveration, continuing to say the same sentence and 30 minutes later he entered a state of confusion. He recovered completely from this consciousness disturbance after 30 hours. No lesion except for the old infarction was demonstrated on CT and MRI. Confusion in this case was assumed to be a toxic reaction caused by the contrast agent.

[Biosynthesis and significance of acute phase proteins].

Acute phase proteins (APP) increase by the chemical receptors of macrophage via stimulations of either Fc or complement or other chemical receptors. No differences of APP pattern were observed by the different stimulants, because the effects of stimulation are changed by many processing steps in the macrophage as well as in the liver cell thereafter. Whether the APP increase results in good prognosis for original sickness or not are examined by multiple regression analysis in 38 cases of maxillary and 51 cases of laryngeal cancer with the observation for over five years. Alpha 1X contributes positively with length of their life, whereas alpha 1AG and ceruloplasmin contribute negatively. We could say that not all components of APP increase are advantageous for the diseases.

[Serum protein fractions in patients with laryngeal cancer undergoing radiation therapy. Possibility as a prognostic factor].

The levels of 21 protein components of the sera of 45 patients with cancer of the larynx undergoing radiation therapy were determined by a single radial immunodiffusion method before and after radiation therapy. We examined the correlation between changes in serum protein fractions and the prognosis of the patients. The patients with cancer of the larynx were treated with external irradiation of 60Co gammer-rays. Total target doses were 60 Gy. The levels of the same protein components were also measured in 43 normal adult individuals as a control. All patients were observed for 5 years and 12 years following radiation therapy. In the pretreatment sera obtained from patients with cancer of the larynx, the concentrations of prealbumin (Prealb), antithrombin III (ATIII) and plasminogen (Pmg) were significantly lower than controls. However the concentrations of alpha 1-acid glycoprotein (alpha 1AG), alpha 1-antitrypsin (alpha 1AT), alpha 1-antichymotrypsin (alpha 1X), haptoglobin (Hp), fibrinogen (Fib) and hemopexin (Hx) were elevated. At the completion of radiation therapy, the alpha 1AG, alpha 1AT, alpha 1X, Hp, Fib and inter alpha trypsin inhibitor (I alpha I) were significantly elevated than those normal controls. In patients without recurrent cancer after radiation therapy, the alpha 1AT, ceruloplasmin (Cp), Fib, IgA and Hx levels measured before radiation therapy were significantly lower than those patients with recurrent cancer. In patients without recurrent cancer after radiation therapy, the alpha 1AT, Hp, Cp, IgG, and IgA levels measured after radiation therapy were reduced compared with those patients with recurrent cancer. In patients who had lived more than 5 years after radiation therapy, the alpha 1AT, Cp and Fib levels measured before radiation therapy reduced significantly compared with those who had died within 5 years. In those who had lived more than 5 years, the alpha 1AG, alpha 1AT, Hp, Fib, IgG, and IgA levels measured after radiation therapy were reduced significantly compared with those who died within 5 years. In cases of laryngeal cancer following a period of 5 to 12 years after radiation therapy, multiple regression analysis was used to determine whether increased concentrations of serum protein fractions were associated with good prognosis for the original disease. AT III, Prealb, alpha 1AG, albumin (Alb) and I alpha I before radiation therapy were positively correlated with survival, whereas Hx, Pmg, Cp, IgM, Cl inhibitor (ClInh), alpha 1AT and Fib showed negative correlations. After radiation therapy, transferrin (Tf), Cp, Prealb, AT III and I alpha I were found to be positively associated with survival, whereas IgA, IgM, Pmg, alpha 1X and alpha 1AG were negative factors. From the elevation levels of acute phase proteins (alpha 1AT, Cp) and Fib and immunoglobulins (IgA, IgM) in the serum and lower levels of Prealb and AT III before and after radiation therapy, we may predict a relatively poor prognosis in these patients of laryngeal cancer.

Rapid protein fragment search using hash functions based on the Fourier transform.

MOTIVATION: Since the protein structure database has been growing very rapidly in recent years, the development of efficient methods for searching for similar structures is very important. RESULTS: This paper presents a novel method for searching for similar fragments of proteins. In this method, a hash vector (a vector of real numbers) is associated with each fixed-length fragment of three-dimensional protein structure. Each vector consists of low-frequency components of the Fourier-like spectrum for the distances between C alpha atoms and the centroid. Then, we can analyze the similarity between fragments by evaluating the difference between hash vectors. The novel aspect of the method is that the following property is proved theoretically: if the root mean square distance between two fragments is small, then the distance between the hash vectors is small. Several variants of this method were compared with a naive method and a previous method using PDB data. The results show that the fastest one among the variants is 18-80 times faster than the naive method, and 3-10 times faster than the previous method.

A multi-level description scheme of protein conformation.

We propose a novel description scheme of protein backbone conformation that can model the important factors of protein structure formation, such as global interaction and geometric constraints. This description scheme represents a protein conformation with several symbolic sequences of multiple levels of abstraction. Each symbol in the sequence denotes the class of abstracted topology of subconformation with the size specific to the level. Low level sequences of this description represent fine structures of high resolution, and high level sequences represent the abstracted topologies of large scale. The classification of protein backbone subconformations of various sizes is the most important base for this description scheme. This has never been tried so far due to the complexity in dealing with the number of degrees of freedom in subconformations. However, the proposed technique solved this problem by abstracting the topology of middle and large scale subconformations. This linear expansion technique extracts a fixed number of parameters as the expansion coefficients from the co-ordinate representation of subconformations. In this case, the simple reverse-transformation from the expansion coefficients reconstructs the three-dimensional topology of a subconformation. The analysis of the relation between primary structure of a region and the subconformation of that region at each level in this description helps to model both local and global interactions of protein structure formation. Further, the statistic analysis of overlapping patterns of two subconformations models the geometric constraints important for a structure prediction system in generating a conformation which is geometrically sound.

PDB-REPRDB: a database of representative protein chains in PDB (Protein Data Bank).

We propose a novel set of 'representative' protein chains in PDB, where not only sequential but also structural similarities are taken into account. Hobohm et al. have already proposed "PDB_SELECT", which eliminates redundant chains based solely on sequence similarity. "PDB_SELECT" is frequently updated and the latest version is available at EMBL WWW server. In our set of entries "PDB-REPRDB," however, structural similarities are also considered, in order not to overlook local conformation diversity within a group of sequentially similar chains. Our set guarantees that every representative is the best among that similar protein group, regarding experimental or structure-determination quality (i.e. resolution and R-value). The first version (based on PDB Release 70) of PDB-REPRDB was released in 1995 and the second version (PDB Release 78) will be available by April 1997.

Parallel Protein Information Analysis (PAPIA) System Running on a 64-Node PC Cluster.

Protein information analysis is widely regarded as a key technology in drug design, macromolecular engineering, and understanding genome sequences. Because vast amount of calculations are required, further speed-up for protein information analysis is very much in demand. We have implemented the PAPIA (PArallel Protein Information Analysis) system on the RWC PC cluster IIa (PAPIA cluster) which consists of 64 Pentium Pro 200MHz microprocessors. The PAPIA system performs fast parallel processing for typical calculations in protein analysis, such as structure similarity search, sequence homology search and multiple sequence alignment, nearly 60 times faster than a single processor. We have started a WWW service (http://www.rwcp.or.jp/papia/), allowing any biologist to easily submit jobs to the PAPIA system through a WWW browser. The user can experience the power of current parallel processing technology.

The Multi-Scale 3D-1D compatibility scoring for inverse protein folding problem.

The applicability of the Multi-Scale Structure Description (MSSD) scheme to the inverse-folding problems was investigated. An MSSD represents a 3D protein structure with multiple symbolic sequences, where fine structures are represented with the sequence at low levels, the middle scale structural motifs at middle levels, and global topology at high levels. Each symbol in the symbolic sequence denotes a type of local structure of the level scale. The structure fragments are classified at each scale level respectively according to the shape and the environment around the fragments: how the structure is exposed to the solvent or buried in the molecule. I modeled the propensity of an amino-acid sequence to the structure fragment type (i.e., primary constraint) at each scale level. The local propensity is, therefore, modeled at small scale (low) levels, while the global propensity modeled at large scale (high) levels. Thus, superposing all the primary constraint, a 3D protein structure yields an amino-acid sequence profile. Evaluating the fit of an amino acid sequence to the profile derived from the known 3D protein structure, we can identify which 3D structure the given amino-acid sequence would fold into. I checked whether a sequence identifies its own structure over two hundred protein sequences. In many cases, an amino acid sequence identified its own 3D protein structure.