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Background. Nuclear staining by immunofluorescence in a kidney biopsy is often seen in patients with positive antinuclear antibodies (ANA) in the serum. These ANA are usually polyclonal, but herein we report 9 cases with an unusual finding of monoclonal nuclear staining by immunofluorescence on kidney biopsy. Case Presentation. Nine cases with predominant stain for kappa or lambda light chain were identified by searching the renal pathology laboratory database for the past 10 years. All cases had positive stain for only kappa (six cases) or lambda (three cases) light chain in the nuclei. Eight out of nine cases had positive nuclear IgG stain, and one case had positive nuclear IgA stain. Among cases with positive nuclear IgG staining, six cases were positive for IgG1 subclass, one case was positive for IgG2 subclass, and one case was positive for IgG3 subclass. All patients with positive IgG nuclear stain, who had testing for ANA, had positive ANA. Patients with positive IgG1 subclass did not have monoclonal protein in the serum or urine, but the patient with positive IgG2 subclass and lambda light chain stain in the nuclei had IgG lambda monoclonal gammopathy. Conclusions. We identified a new unique pattern of nuclear stain by immunofluorescence in kidney biopsies that suggests the presence of monoclonal ANA. Workup for underlying monoclonal gammopathy is warranted in such patients.

Polyethylene terephthalate-polylactic acid copolymer (PET-PLA) was synthesized from bis (2-hydroxyethyl terephthalate) and L-lactic acid oligomer in the presence of manganese antimony glycoxide as a catalyst. The synthesized PET-PLA copolymer was used for controlled drug release systems with gold nanoparticles. Fluorouracil containing PET-PLA nanocapsules was prepared in the presence of gold nanoparticles by solvent evaporation method. The morphologies of the nanocapsules were characterized using scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Controlled release of Fu and Fu@Au was carried out in 0.1 M phosphate buffer (pH 7.4) and 0.1 M HCl solution. The results indicated that the drug release for gold nanoparticles/fluorouracil (Au@Fu) incorporated PET-PLA nanocapsules was controlled and slow compared to Fu incorporated PET-PLA nanocapsules. This may be due to the interaction between the gold nanoparticles and fluorouracil in PET-PLA nanocapsules.

In this note, the generalized Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury (for short GSMW) formula (A+YGZ∗)⊙=A⊙−A⊙Y(G⊙+Z∗A⊙Y)⊙Z∗A⊙ is extended under some assumptions weaker than those used by Duan, 2013.

This paper explores a variety of different CMOS varactor structures for RF and MMICs. A typical 0.18 μm CMOS foundry process was used as the study platform. The varactors' capacitance-voltage characteristics and cutoff frequencies have been examined up to 55 GHz. The primary aim of this work is to design varactors that can improve nonlinear-transmission-line (NLTL) pulse-compression circuits. The results should also be valuable for other applications up to millimeter wavelengths.

Ab initio prediction is the challenging attempt to predict protein structures based only on sequence information and without using templates. It is often divided into two distinct sub-problems: (a) the scoring function that can distinguish native, or native-like structures, from non-native ones; and (b) the method of searching the conformational space. Currently, there is no reliable scoring function that can always drive a search to the native fold, and there is no general search method that can guarantee a significant sampling of near-natives. Pathway models combine the scoring function and the search. In this short review, we explore some of the ways pathway models are used in folding, in published works since 2001, and present a new pathway model, HMMSTR-CM, that uses a fragment library and a set of nucleation/propagation-based rules. The new method was used for ab initio predictions as part of CASP5. This work was presented at the Winter School in Bioinformatics, Bologna, Italy, 10–14 February 2003.