Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent age-dependent form of dementia, characterized by extracellular amyloid deposits comprising amyloid β-peptide (Aβ) in the cerebral cortex. Increasing evidence has indicated that ganglioside GM1 (GM1) in lipid rafts plays a pivotal role in amyloid deposition of Aβ and the related cytotoxicity in AD. Despite recent efforts to characterize Aβ-lipid int...

PURPOSE The presence of anti-ganglioside (GM1) or anti-glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) antibodies has been reported in association with therapy-resistant epilepsy mostly of focal origin. Our aim was to detect GM1 and GAD autoantibodies in patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) and to evaluate their association with rarely encountered therapy-resistant cases in this idiopathic general...

PNS axons have a high intrinsic regenerative ability, whereas most CNS axons show little regenerative response. We show that activation of Neu3 sialidase, also known as Neuraminidase-3, causing conversion of GD1a and GT1b to GM1 ganglioside, is an essential step in regeneration occurring in PNS (sensory) but not CNS (retinal) axons in adult rat. In PNS axons, axotomy activates Neu3 sialidase, i...

Immunotherapy with rituximab alone or in conjunction with chemotherapy has significantly improved the treatment outcome of B-cell lymphoma patients. Nevertheless, a subpopulation of patients does not respond to rituximab. The reason for treatment failure as well as the exact mechanism of action is still uncertain. The function of rituximab has long been associated with the partitioning of CD20 ...

This study investigated the neuronal protective effect of monosialotetrahexosylganglioside (GM1) on the hypoxia-ischemia white matter damage (WMD) in neonatal rats. Brain hypoxia-ischemia was induced by bilateral carotid artery occlusion in 4-day-old neonatal rats. Bilateral carotid artery occlusion (BCAO) was performed in rats in WMD and GM1 groups, while in sham group; the rat bilateral carot...

CFA/I pili are representatives of a large family of related pili that mediate the adherence of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli to intestinal epithelial cells. They are assembled via the alternate chaperone-usher pathway and consist of two subunits, CfaB, which makes up the pilus shaft and a single pilus tip-associated subunit, CfaE. The current model of pilus-mediated adherence proposes that C...

There is a strong association between Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) and Penner's serotype 19 (PEN 19) of Campylobacter jejuni. Sera from patients with GBS after C. jejuni infection have autoantibodies to GM1 ganglioside in the acute phase of the illness. Our previous work has suggested that GBS results from an immune response to cross-reactive antigen between lipopolysaccharide (LPS) of the Gra...

It was previously shown that sphingomyelin and gangliosides can be biosynthesized starting from sphingosine or sphingosine-containing fragments which originated in the course of GM1 ganglioside catabolism. In the present paper we investigated which fragments were specifically re-used for sphingomyelin and ganglioside biosynthesis in rat liver. At 30 h after intravenous injection of GM1 labelled...

Little is known about the organization of lipids in biomembranes. Lipid rafts are defined as sphingolipid- and cholesterol-rich clusters in the membrane. Details of the lipid distribution of lipid rafts are not well characterized mainly because of a lack of appropriate probes. Ganglioside GM1-specific protein, cholera toxin, has long been the only lipid probe of lipid rafts. Recently it was sho...

A comparison of histochemical detection of GM1 ganglioside in cryostat sections using cholera toxin B-subunit after fixation with 4% formaldehyde and dry acetone gave tissue-dependent results. In the liver no pre-treatment showed detectable differences related to GM1 reaction products, while studies in the brain showed the superiority of acetone pre-extraction (followed by formaldehyde), which ...