Uraemic rats made by adenine diet developed severe abnormalities of calcium metabolism in a relatively short period and therefore they may serve as a useful model for the analysis of parathyroid hyperplasia and vascular calcification in chronic renal failure.

Various partially or fully desialylated human erythropoietins were obtained by neuraminidase digestion of the hormone, without non-specific proteolysis and degradation of carbohydrates. Asialoerythropoietin showed a specific activity of 220-IU/mg protein in vivo, although that of the intact erythropoietin was 2.2 x 10' IU/mg. A linear relationship was found between the logarithm of the specific activity in vivo and the number of sialic acids. The asialoerythropoietin showed a four-times-higher specific activity in vitro compared with intact erythropoietin using mouse bone marrow cells. It also showed an approximately six-times-higher specific activity in a colonyforming assay for the erythroid colony-forming unit and the erythroid burst-forming unit. Partially or fully de-N-glycosylated erythropoietin derivatives also showed lower in vivo activity but higher in vitro activity than the intact erythropoietin, dependent on the number of sialic acids. To clarify the reason for the enhanced biological activity of asialoerythropoietin in vitro, the binding of intact '251-erythropoietin or 1251-asialoerythropoietin to cells containing specific receptors for the hormone was analyzed. 251-asialoerythropoietin bound to spleen cells from anemic mice approximately five times faster than did intact '251-erythropoietin. The amount of 12'1-asialoerythropoietin internalized by target cells, measured in the absence of NaN3, was four times higher than that of intact erythropoietin. These results demonstrate that asialoerythropoietin binds to its receptor faster than the intact form. This may be the main reason for the increased activity of asialoerythropoietin in vitro.

Rare-earth chelate-doped graded index (GI) polymer optical fibers (POF) are proposed and fabricated. The attenuation loss was measured to be 0.4 dB/m at 650 nm for a GI POF doped with 1 wt % of europium (Eu) chelate. Lifetime shortening and spectral narrowing verified the occurrence of superfluorescence at 614 nm in the Eu chelate-doped GI POF pumped with xenon flashlamps. The demonstration of superfluorescence shows that rare-earth chelate-doped GI POFs are appealing as optical amplifiers and superfluorescent sources in a variety of communication and sensor applications.

Physicochemical and biological properties of recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) were compared with human urinary erythropoietin (uEPO). uEPO and rhEPO were purified to apparent homogeneity from the urine of patients with aplastic anemia and from the conditioned medium of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells transfected with a cDNA clone for human EPO, respectively. The microheterogeneous nature of both factors, observed on isoelectric focusing, is derived from the difference of the number of terminal sialic acid residues bound to the carbohydrate chains of the EPO molecule. The primary structure of rhEPO, consisting of 165 amino acid residues, was determined, and the C-terminal arginine predicted from the cDNA sequence was confirmed to be missing, as described previously (Recny et al. (1987) J. Biol. Chem. 262, 17156). Three N-glycosylation and one O-glycosylation sites of both factors were determined as Asn24, Asn38, and Asn83 and Ser126, respectively. Two disulfide linkages are located between Cys7 and Cys161, and between Cys29 and Cys33, in both EPOs. Hematogenic potencies of rhEPO and uEPO compared in normal and in partially nephrectomized rats were approximately the same. Both factors also stimulated the colony formation of CFU-E, BFU-E, and CFU-Meg in a dose-dependent manner. From these results, it is concluded that rhEPO produced in CHO cells transfected with cDNA clone for human EPO is indistinguishable from uEPO physicochemically and biologically, and is valuable for further research and for clinical use.