The interleukin-6 (IL-6) signal is transduced through membrane-anchored gp130, which is associated with IL-6 receptor (IL-6R) in the presence of IL-6. Soluble forms of gp130 (sgp130) with molecular weights of 90 and 110 Kd were found in human serum. In the presence of recombinant IL- 6 (rIL-6), serum sgp130 were capable of associating with serum sIL-6R. By the sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, healthy human sera was shown to contain 390 +/- 72 ng/mL of sgp130. A mouse pro-B-cell line-derived transfectant, BAF-130, expressing human gp130 was used to examine the function of serum sgp130. When supplemented with rIL-6, human serum induced DNA synthesis in BAF-130 cells, whereas the serum deprived of sIL-6R did not. In contrast, the DNA synthesis induced in BAF-130 cells by rIL-6-supplemented serum was increased when the serum was deprived of sgp130. These results indicated that serum sgp130 could negatively regulate the IL-6 signal. Recently, gp130 has been shown to be involved in the signaling processes of oncostatin M, leukemia inhibitory factor, and ciliary neurotropic factor, in addition to those of IL-6. Recombinant sgp130 showed inhibitory effect on the biologic function of such cytokines. This work implies physiologic roles of naturally produced serum sgp130 in modulating signals through gp130.

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Using long-range corrected density functional theory, the relationships between the electronic, magnetic, and nonlinear optical properties are drawn for two families of organic compounds, the dicyclopenta-fused acenes (DPAs) and the polyacenes (PAs), containing up to N = 12 fused rings. First, the longitudinal second hyperpolarizability (γ) of singlet DPAs is significantly enhanced with increasing system size, in comparison to PAs. This behavior is associated with an increase in the longitudinal spin polarization between the terminal five-membered rings of DPAs and is consistent with previous studies where γ is maximized for intermediate diradical character. The size dependence of the diradical character is also found to cause a hump in the γ/N evolution for singlet DPAs around N = 8. In fact, in the case of singlet PAs, the diradical characters y(0) and y(1), the various magnetic properties and the γ/N values vary monotonically with N, whereas for singlet DPAs, the shielding, the magnetizability, and the γ/N values exhibit extrema near N = 8 due to the appearance of transversal spin polarization in the middle six-membered rings in addition to the longitudinal spin polarization between the terminal five-membered rings. Moreover, it is shown that for singlet DPAs the longitudinal spin polarization (characterized by y(0)) is associated with the antiaromaticity (N ≤ 3) and the slight- or non-aromaticity (N ≥ 4) of the terminal five-membered rings, whereas the appearance of transversal spin-polarization (characterized by y(1)) is associated with the decrease in the aromaticity in the inner six-membered rings as shown for large PAs. Therefore, the exceptional behaviors in singlet DPAs for small N (N < 9) are caused by the increase in diradical character y(0) correlated with the anti-aromaticity or the slight-/non-aromaticity of terminal rings and the corresponding emergence of a global aromatic character. Such a relationship between the aromaticity/antiaromaticity and the diradical character is useful for designing real open-shell NLO molecules through the control of their diradical characters.