The importance of rainbow trout (Onchorhynchus mykiss) in Iran aquaculture industry on one hand, and increasing the mortality of this fish due to outbreaks of infectious diseases, on the other hand, indicate the requirement for more profound understanding the rainbow trout immune system and access to laboratory tools for definitive diagnosis of its diseases. One of the most important defense me...

BACKGROUND Chlamydia pneumoniae (Cpn) has been proposed as a possible etiologic agent in multiple sclerosis (MS). However, previous studies were cross-sectional and could not assess whether Cpn infection preceded the onset of MS. METHODS The authors conducted a prospective nested case-control study among 3 million US Army personnel and 121,466 members of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Pro...

Recent work indicates that mutations in a cytidine deaminase homologue ablate both immunoglobulin class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation. These findings now explain cases of autosomal hyper-IgM syndrome and reveal that critical components for key functions of B cells require RNA editing.

Several genetic defects in class switch recombination, which lead to a hyper-IgM syndrome, have been described recently in humans. In addition to the well known role of CD40-ligand-CD40 interaction, these pathologies demonstrate definitively the requirement of CD40-mediated nuclear factor kappa B activation and the essential role of a recently described molecule, the activation-induced cytidine...