The objective of this study is to investigate the clinical markers of life-threatening Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP) in patients with collagen vascular diseases (CVD). The patients who contracted Pneumocystis jeroveccii were retrospectively selected from our medical charts and conditions related to the patients' death were reviewed. The findings indicated that lower levels of serum albumin and cholinesterase, increased alveolar-arterial oxygen gradient, intratracheal intubation, and necessity to treat in the intensive care unit were significantly related to deaths associated with PCP in CVD. A special attention should be paid to decreased serum albumin and cholinesterase as ominous predictors in PCP occurred in patients with CVD.
Only a small proportion of the mouse genome is transcribed into mature messenger RNA transcripts. There is an international collaborative effort to identify all full-length mRNA transcripts from the mouse, and to ensure that each is represented in a physical collection of clones. Here we report the manual annotation of 60,770 full-length mouse complementary DNA sequences. These are clustered into 33,409 'transcriptional units', contributing 90.1% of a newly established mouse transcriptome database. Of these transcriptional units, 4,258 are new protein-coding and 11,665 are new non-coding messages, indicating that non-coding RNA is a major component of the transcriptome. 41% of all transcriptional units showed evidence of alternative splicing. In protein-coding transcripts, 79% of splice variations altered the protein product. Whole-transcriptome analyses resulted in the identification of 2,431 sense-antisense pairs. The present work, completely supported by physical clones, provides the most comprehensive survey of a mammalian transcriptome so far, and is a valuable resource for functional genomics.
