Background and Aim: In recent years, the use of herbal oral care products has been taken into consideration for reducing dental plaque accumulation. Propolis has been widely used in medicine due to its multiple biological properties. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antiplaque efficacy of an herbal toothpaste containing propolis in comparison with a control group. Materials and Method...

A rapid neutralization test for influenza A and B viruses was developed. In this method, a 96-well tissue culture plate was used for the preparation of cell monolayers and the peroxidase-antiperoxidase staining technique was used for the visualization of foci infected with these viruses. In the presence of trypsin and tragacanth gum, clear foci developed 1 day after infection. A linear relation...

Four commercially available enzyme immunoassay (EIA) kits were evaluated in comparison with the plaque reduction neutralization (PRN) test for detection of measles virus antibody. The EIA kits, Enzygnost (Behring), Diamedix, Vidas (bioMerieux Vitek), and Measlestat (Biowhittaker), were assessed with two PRN cutoff titers: a PRN titer of 8, the lowest detectable antibody level by the PRN test un...

A seroepidemiological survey was conducted from 1998 to 2000 to determine the seroprevalence of dengue virus infection in a cohort of healthy Singapore university undergraduates aged 19-26 years using a commercial dengue indirect IgG enzyme immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit (PanBio). Out of 184 volunteers, 41 (22%) tested seropositive, suggesting that 78% of this young cohort would be susceptible...

Serum samples from 689 hunter-killed white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) collected during the 2001 fall hunting season in New Jersey were tested for neutralizing antibodies to West Nile virus (WNV) and St. Louis encephalitis virus (SLEV) by plaque-reduction neutralization tests. WNV-neutralizing antibodies were detected in six (0.9%) of the samples, and SLEV-neutralizing antibodies were ...

or postnatally with human rotavirus D (serotype 1) were tested by plaque reduction neutralization assay for antibody to bovine rotavirus and to three serotypes of human rotavirus. Homologous antibody developed in all animals, but antibody to heterologous rotaviruses developed mainly in animals exposed in utero to bovine rotavirus. The development of heterologous antibody may explain the immunol...

Nipah virus (NiV) and Hendra virus (HeV) are zoonotic paramyxoviruses capable of causing severe disease in humans and animals. These viruses require biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) containment. Like other paramyxoviruses, the plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT) can be used to detect antibodies to the surface glycoproteins, fusion (F) and attachment (G), and PRNT titers give an indication of p...

The lack of reliable, high-throughput tools for characterizing anti-dengue virus (DENV) antibodies in large numbers of serum samples has been an obstacle in understanding the impact of neutralizing antibodies on disease progression and vaccine efficacy. A reporter system using pseudoinfectious DENV reporter virus particles (RVPs) was previously developed by others to facilitate the genetic mani...

Effective and simple delivery of DNA vaccines remains a key to successful clinical applications. Previously, we developed novel class vaccines, sometimes called iDNA, which encodes the whole live-attenuated vaccine viruses. Compared standard vaccine, an iDNA required low dose launch in vitro or vivo . The goal this pilot study was investigate if encoding Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VE...