CCT was not associated with refractive error, corneal curvature, anterior chamber depth and axial length. CCT is an independent factor unrelated to other ocular parameters.

Blue fluorescent proteins (BFPs) offer visualization of protein location and behavior, but often suffer from high autofluorescent background and poor signal discrimination. Through dual-laser excitation of bright and photoinduced dark states, mutations to the residues surrounding the BFP chromophore enable long-wavelength optical modulation of BFP emission. Such dark state engineering enables violet-excited blue emission to be increased upon lower energy, green co-illumination. Turning this green co-illumination on and off at a specific frequency dynamically modulates collected blue fluorescence without generating additional background. Interpreted as transient photoconversion between neutral cis- and anionic trans- chromophoric forms, mutations tune photoisomerization and ground state tautomerizations to enable long-wavelength depopulation of the millisecond-lived, spectrally shifted dark states. Single mutations to the tyrosine-based blue fluorescent protein T203V/S205V exhibit enhanced modulation depth and varied frequency. Importantly, analogous single point mutations in the non-modulatable BFP, mKalama1, creates a modulatable variant. Building modulatable BFPs offers opportunities for improved BFP signal discrimination vs. background, greatly enhancing their utility.

Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway is thought to be implicated in the development of arterial stiffness and vascular calcification. As a Wnt signaling pathway inhibitor, it is interesting to investigate whether sclerostin or dickkopf-1 (DKK1) level is correlated with arterial stiffness in renal transplant (RT) recipients. Fasting blood samples were obtained for biochemical data, sclerostin, DKK1, and osteoprotegerin (OPG) determinations. In this study, we applied automatic pulse wave analyzer (VaSera VS-1000) to measure brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity and either sides of brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity value, which greater than 14.0 m/s was determined as high arterial stiffness. Among 68 RT recipients, 30 patients (44.1%) were in the high arterial stiffness group. Compared with patients in the low arterial stiffness group, patients in the high arterial stiffness group had higher prevalence of hypertension (P = 0.002), diabetes (P < 0.001), metabolic syndrome (P = 0.025), longer posttransplant duration (P = 0.005), higher systolic blood pressure (P < 0.001) and diastolic blood pressure (P = 0.018), and higher fasting glucose (P = 0.004), total cholesterol (P = 0.042), blood urea nitrogen (P = 0.020), phosphorus (P = 0.042), and sclerostin levels (P = 0.001). According to our multivariable forward stepwise linear regression analysis, age (β = 0.272, P = 0.014), phosphorus (β = 0.308, P = 0.007), and logarithmically-transformed OPG (log-OPG; β = 0.222, P = 0.046) were positively associated with sclerostin levels, and multivariate logistic regression analysis, sclerostin (odds ratio 1.052, 95% confidence interval 1.007–1.099, P = 0.024), and posttransplant duration (odds ratio 1.024, 95% confidence interval 1.004–1.045, P = 0.019) were the independent predictors of peripheral arterial stiffness in RT recipients. In this study, serum sclerostin level, but not DKK1, was proved to be involved in the pathogenetic process of peripheral arterial stiffness in RT recipients.