Early Stages of Tight Junctional Disassembly

Recent studies using vaginal-cervical cells suggest yet another mechanism for the early stage of tight junctional disassembly, namely, the breakdown of occludin 65-kDa isoform to the lesser functional 50-kDa isoform. Occludin appears to constitutively undergo calpain-mediated proteolysis, increasing the amount of non-functional 50-kDa isoform [35, 43], As described above, 

Tight junction elements are modeled as pores that flicker between open and closed states [131], such that each small segment can be at one of two states, sealed (rciosed) or open (ropen) (r being referred to as the microscopic 

The vaginal-cervical epithelium system was therefore used to probe pcr in order to understand mechanisms that control and regulate / lis- Data summarized below suggest that both estrogen status and aging may critically affect the 7 lis of vaginal-cervical cells in women. 

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