BACKGROUND Naturally occurring alloantibodies produced against A and B red cell antigens in cats can cause acute hemolytic transfusion reactions. Blood incompatibilities, unrelated to the AB blood group system, have also been suspected after blood transfusions through routine crossmatch testing or as a result of hemolytic transfusion reactions. HYPOTHESIS Incompatible crossmatch results among...

Monoclonal antibodies specific for foreign antigens, auto-antigens, allogeneic antigens and tumour neo-antigens in the context of major histocompatibility complex II (MHCII) are highly desirable as novel immunotherapeutics. However, there is no standard protocol for the efficient generation of monoclonal antibodies that recognize peptide in the context of MHCII, and only a limited number of suc...

Chronic hepatitis delta virus infection (CHD) is a condition arising from super-infection of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-infected patients, resulting in a more rapid advance in liver pathology and hepatocellular carcinoma than is observed for HBV mono-infection. Although hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is structurally simple, its life cycle involves the complex participation of host enzymes, HBV-derive...

In pre-B lymphocytes, productive rearrangement of Ig light chain genes allows assembly of the B cell receptor (BCR), which selectively promotes further developmental maturation through poorly defined transmembrane signaling events. Using a novel in vitro system to study immune tolerance during development, we find that BCR reactivity to auto-antigen blocks this positive selection, preventing do...

MF59 is an oil-in-water emulsion adjuvant approved for human influenza vaccination in European Union. The mode of action of MF59 is not fully elucidated yet, but results from several years of investigation indicate that MF59 establishes an immunocompetent environment at injection site which promotes recruitment of immune cells, including antigen presenting cells (APCs), that are facilitated to ...

b2-Glycoprotein I (b2-GPI), also known as apolipoprotein H, is a 50 kDa protein that was described for the first time in 1961, and in 1968 the first apparently healthy person was identified deficient in this protein. As no function could be attributed to b2-GPI, the protein did not receive much attention and on average a single publication per year appeared in the literature. From 1990 onwards,...

Weintraud (1913) was the first to envisage the possibility that tissue alterations in rheumatic patients may be due to a pathogenic anaphylactic reaction, but at that time it was not possible to verify his hypothesis by laboratory tests. The toxic properties of sera from rheumatic fever patients were first experimentally demonstrated by Ramsdell and Davidsohn (1930), and Klujeva and Bobritzkaja...

OpenTuner can help users achieve better or more portable performance in their speci c domain through program autotuning. A key challenge for users seeking good autotuning performance in OpenTuner is selecting a search approach appropriate for problem. However, not only are current in-situ learning search approaches not robust enough to handle all search spaces, but there are also too many possi...

Auto-antibodies against topoisomerase I (topo I) are frequently detected in sera of systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients. Anti-topo I auto-antibodies are considered to be associated with the diffuse cutaneous form of systemic sclerosis (dcSSc). However, anti-topo I auto-antibodies are also detected in limited cutaneous systemic sclerosis (lcSSc) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). In this stud...