BACKGROUND The central paradigm of ecological immunology postulates that selection acts on immunity as to minimize its cost/benefit ratio. Costs of immunity may arise because the energetic requirements of the immune response divert resources that are no longer available for other vital functions. In addition to these resource-based costs, mis-directed or over-reacting immune responses can be pa...

Prevention or therapy for bioterrorism-associated anthrax infections requires rapidly acting effective vaccines. We recently demonstrated (Y. Tan, N. R. Hackett, J. L. Boyer, and R. G. Crystal, Hum. Gene Ther. 14:1673-1682, 2003) that a single administration of a recombinant serotype 5 adenovirus (Ad) vector expressing anthrax protective antigen (PA) provides rapid protection against anthrax le...

the innate immune system utilizes pattern recognition receptors (prrs) to recognize microbes. pathogens contain various molecules with diverse effects on immune response. in this study, we evaluated the effect of dna and protein components derived from two intracellular microorganisms including listeria monocytogenes (l.monocytogenes) and toxoplasma gondii (t. gondii) on dendritic cells (dcs) a...

objective: medical students are exposed to various infectious diseases during their clinical training period, including measles and rubella. in iran, to control the outbreaks of measles and rubella a mass vaccination campaign was conducted on 2003. the present investigation evaluates immunity to measles and rubella in a group of babol medical students and determines the prevalence of medical st...

background: hepatitis b infection is a major public health problem worldwide. dental students who are frequently in contact with body fluids like blood and saliva are still at high risk for hbv exposure. the aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of hbv vaccine and personal factors associated with serologic evidence of the immune response. methods: a descriptive-cross sectional stu...

natural killer (nk) cells are a subset of lymphocytes which play a crucial role in early innate immune response against infection and tumor transformation. furthermore, they secrete interferon-γ (ifn-γ) and tumor necrosis factor (tnf) prompting adaptive immu-nity. nk cells distinguish the unhealthy cells from the healthy ones through an array of cell-surface receptors. human nk cells use inhibi...

Failure to achieve a protected state after influenza vaccination is poorly understood but occurs commonly among aged populations experiencing greater immunosenescence. In order to better understand immune response in the elderly, we studied epigenetic and transcriptomic profiles and humoral immune response outcomes in 50-74 year old healthy participants. Associations between DNA methylation and...

Periodontal diseases usually refer to common inflammatory disorders known as gingivitis and periodontitis, which are caused by a pathogenic microbiota in the subgingival biofilm, including Porphyromonas gingivalis, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, Tannerella forsythia and Treponema denticola that trigger innate, inflammatory, and adaptive immune responses. These processes result in the de...