In the United States, a baby is born with a facial cleft every hour, of every day of the year! Such birth defects result from both gene mutations and environmental insults.

Although many current studies focused on catch up growth (CUG) have described its high susceptibility to insulin resistance-related diseases very few have focused on the effect of CUG on bone metabolism, especially in adulthood.

Interferon-stimulated gene 15 (ISG15), a ubiquitin like protein, is highly elevated in a variety of cancers including breast cancer.

In a paper published in the December 2011 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, a team of scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign led by Rex Gaskins, PhD have demonstrated that both microbial and host inflammatory factors modulate sulfomucin production in a human cell line, LS174T, that models intestinal goblet cells.

Stromal cells, as distinct from hematopoietic cells, are an essential component of the bone marrow microenvironment and are necessary for the long-term maintenance of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in vitro.