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Ischemic preconditioning is well known to afford protection against subsequent episodes of ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) in multiple organs, including the kidney, but the mechanisms involved are not fully understood. We proposed that ischemic preconditioning results in an altered mitochondrial proteome that confers resistance to subsequent I/R injury. We subjected rats to moderate ischemic injury and used liquid chromatography – mass spectroscopy (LC/MS) to analyze the proteome of kidney cortical mitochondria isolated following 14 days of recovery from I/R. The expression of several proteins was elevated following preconditioning, and two were selected for further analysis: Isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 (IDH2) and a member of the sulfotransferase family (SULT1A1). The effect of increased expression of these proteins was evaluated by using hydrodynamic gene delivery of plasmid vectors to overexpress each protein. Strikingly, hydrodynamic delivery of IDH2 and SULT1A1 genes attenuated the peak in serum creatinine ...

Fragile X syndrome is recognized as the most common inherited cause of mental retardation in western countries. The prevalence of the fragile X syndrome in Asian populations is uncertain. We report a multi-institutional collaborative study of molecular screening for the fragile X syndrome from 1,127 Chinese mentally retarded (MR) individuals. We found that 2.8% of the Chinese MR population screened by DNA analysis had the fragile X full mutation. Our screening indicated that the fragile X syndrome prevalence was very close to that of Caucasian subjects. In addition, we found that 62.5% of fragile X chromosomes had a single haplotype for DXS548-FRAXAC1 (21-18 repeats) which was present in only 9.7% of controls. This unique distribution of microsatellite markers flanking the FMR1 CGG repeats suggests that the fragile X syndrome in Chinese populations, as in the Caucasian, may also be derived from founder chromosomes.