Psoriasis and atopic dermatitis are chronic and relapsing inflammatory diseases of the skin affecting a large number of patients worldwide. Psoriasis is characterized by a T helper type 1 and/or T helper type 17 immunological response, whereas acute atopic dermatitis lesions exhibit T helper type 2-dominant inflammation. Current single gene and signaling pathways-based models of inflammatory sk...

The outcome of murine infection with Leishmania major is regulated by major histocompatibility complex class II-restricted T helper cells. Invariant chain-deficient (Ii -/-) mice have impaired ability to present major histocompatibility complex class II-restricted antigens, and reduced numbers of CD4+ T cells. Despite these deficits, C57BL/6 Ii -/- mice controlled L. major infection comparably ...

Security is constantly been infringed by inadvertent loss of secret keys, and as a solution, Dodis, Katz, Xu, and Yung [11], in Eurocrypt 2002, proposed a new paradigm called key-insulated security which provides tolerance against key exposures. Their scheme introduces a “helper key” which is used to periodically update the decryption key. The most attractive part of this scheme is that even if...

Thymocytes cultured with irradiated, allogeneic stimulator cells yield no cytotoxic effector cells after a period in culture. If, however, a population of irradiated spleen cells syngeneic to the responder cells are added to these cultures, cytotoxicity is generated. The helper activity present in the irradiated syngeneic spleen cells was found to be mediated by a cell bearing theta antigens. F...

The primary antibody response of BALB/c splenocytes to sheep erythrocytes in vitro was suppressed by infection with Friend leukemia virus (FLV), with the response capacity decreasing with increasing duration of infection. The acquisition of normal antibody responses was amplified by macrophage-produced antibody response helper factor(s). FLV-infected mice were treated with bacterial lipopolysac...

Typical defective interfering (DI) RNAs are more successful in the competition for viral polymerase than the parental (helper) virus, which is mostly due to an altered DI promoter composition. Rabies virus (RV) internal deletion RNAs which possess the authentic RV terminal promoters, and which therefore are transcriptionally active and can be used as vectors for foreign gene expression, are poo...

Adenovirus holds great promise as a gene delivery system; it can hold large amounts of exogenous DNA and can be chemically and genetically modified to improve targeting to specific cells and tissues. A recombinant adenovirus construct expressing p53 is currently in clinical use as a cancer therapy in China. However, the use of adenovirus constructs in therapy is limited due to patients' strong ...

The nature of mental representation of others plays a crucial role in social interactions. Dogs present an ideal model species for the investigation of such mental representations because they develop social ties with both conspecifics and heterospecifics. Former studies found that dogs' preference for larger food quantity could be reversed by humans who indicate the smaller quantity. The quest...

It is well established that B7-CD28/CTLA4 interactions play an important role in the induction of T helper cells for T-dependent antibody responses. However, targeted mutation of CD28 does not significantly affect production of IgG and activation of CD4 T helper cells in response to infections by some viruses and nematode parasites. To test whether the CD28-independent induction of Ig class swi...