PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Hiromitsu Fukuda

Publications and source records attributed to Hiromitsu Fukuda.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

A decrease of cell proliferation by hypothermia in the hippocampus of the neonatal rat.

Hypothermia is a potential therapy for cerebral hypoxic ischemic injury of not only adults but also neonates. However, the side effects of hypothermia in the developing brain, where a massive amount of neurogenesis occurs, remain unclear. We investigated the proliferation of neural progenitor cells by systemic application of the thymidine analog 5-bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) in neonatal rats in a severe hypothermic environment. The rat pups were divided into two groups, a hypothermia group (30 degrees C: n=10) and a normothermia group (37 degrees C: n=10). After the pups were placed for 21 h in each environment, 100 mg/kg/day of BrdU was injected intraperitoneally to label dividing cells, and then the pups were sacrificed at 24 h. We examined the number of BrdU-labeled cells in the subventricular zone of the periventricle and the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus. In the hypothermic environment, BrdU-labeled cells significantly decreased in number in the dentate gyrus, but not in the periventricular region. Thus, the severe hypothermic environment induced a decrease of neurogenesis in the neonatal rat. These observations are noteworthy regarding clinical hypothermia therapy following cerebral hypoxic ischemic injury during the perinatal period.

Aging↗

The effects of repeated corticosteroid administration on the neurogenesis in the neonatal rat.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to clarify the effects on the brain including neurogenesis pretreated with repeated doses of dexamethasone in the neonatal rat. STUDY DESIGN: The 4-day-old Sprague Dawley rats were pretreated with 4 different regimens, namely, single administration of dexamethasone, 2-dose administration, 3-dose administration, and saline administration as a control. Concurrently, bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU), which was incorporated into the dividing cells, was administered. We examined body weight, brain weight, and the number of BrdU-labeled cells in the subventricular zone (SVZ), the subgranular zone (SGZ), and the cortex. RESULTS: Both the body and brain weight of the rats pretreated with dexamethasone were significantly decreased compared with those given saline. Quantitative analysis of BrdU-labeled cells revealed the significant dose-dependent decreases in the SVZ, the SGZ, and the cortex with the dexamethasone treatment. CONCLUSION: We concluded that the decreases in neurogenesis caused by repeated antenatal corticosteroid therapy might result in the adverse effects on the size of the head at birth.

Aging↗

Possible mechanism of adenovirus generation from a cloned viral genome tagged with nucleotides at its ends.

The entire cloned human adenovirus type 5 (Ad5) genome is known to be able to generate infectious virus after transfection into 293 cells when the both ends of the genome are exposed by digestion with appropriate restriction enzymes. However, when one or both ends of the genome are tagged with nucleotides and are not intact, whether the tagged end of the viral genome was remained tagged or corrected to be intact during the generation of viral clones has been unclear and, if such oligonucleotide removal occurs, how does the virus remove these tagged sequences and thereby restore its proper structure? Here, we show in our semi-quantitative study that the generation efficiency of virus clones decreases depending on the length of nucleotide tags at the both ends and that both the oligonucleotide tags were precisely removed during virus generation with restoration of the proper terminal sequences. Interestingly the viral genome of which one end was tagged, while the other was attached about 12-kb sequences, did generate intact viral clones at a reduced but significant efficiency. From these results, we here propose a possible mechanism whereby the terminal-protein-deoxycytidine complex enters from the enzyme-cleaved end and reaches deoxyguanine at the initiating position of DNA synthesis in vivo. A replication origin at one end, embedded deeply in double-stranded DNA, can be activated by two cycles of one-directional full-length DNA synthesis initiated by the other exposed replication origin about 30 kilobases away. We also describe new cassette cosmids which can use not only Pac I but also Bst BI for construction of an adenovirus vector, without reducing construction efficiency.

Adenoviruses, Human↗