the objective of this research was to investigate the efficacy of dietary inclusion of probiotics primalac® and bactocell® and prebiotic fermacto® on broiler’s performance and immune response, individually or in combination. a total of 540 one-d-old male ross 308 broiler chicks were allocated into 6 experimental treatments with 6 replicates of 15 birds per replicate from 1 to 42 d of age. the b...

various commercial vaccines for immunization of broiler chickens against infectious bursal disease (ibd) are available, so it would be appropriate to compare the pathogenicity and immune response of chickens to these vaccines. in this study the pathogenicity and serologic response of four ibd vaccines, cloned d78®, bursine-2®, bursimune® and cevac gambo-l®, were evaluated in specific pathogen f...

the immune responses of mice immunized with ovalbumin (ova) together with killed l. major (klm) promastigotes as adjuvant were studied. three doses (5 × 107, 1 × 108 and 2 × 108) of klm combined with ova (100 mg) were injected into the groups of c57bl/6 mice. bcg and complete freund’s adjuvant (cfa) were used as control adjuvants. lymphocyte proliferation and antibody titers were determined, an...

MicroRNAs have emerged as key regulators of immune responses. They influence immune cells' function and probably the outcome of several infections. Currently, it is largely unknown if helminth parasites and their antigens modify host microRNAs expression. The aim of this study was to explore if excreted/secreted antigens of Taenia crassiceps regulate LPS-induced miRNAs expression in human dendr...

The immune system must discriminate between agents of disease and an organism's healthy cells. While the identification of an antigen as self/non-self is critically important, the dynamic features of antigen presentation may also determine the immune system's response. Here, we use a simple mathematical model of immune activation to explore the idea of antigen discrimination through dynamics. W...

Fetal antigens are allogeneic to the mother’s immune system and should theoretically elicit an immune response. The fact that this does not occur and that the fetus thrives for so long in the mother without undergoing rejection by her immune system is a scientific mystery. There are five main theories that could explain the fetus’s success in evading the mother’s immune system. These are the mo...

Crohn's disease (CD) is driven by seemingly aberrant immune responses directed toward commensal enteric microflora. However, the specific antigens targeted by this immune response remain largely undefined. Herein, we demonstrate that common enteric flagellins are one such target of the CD-associated immune response. Thus flagellin may not only drive acute inflammation via activation of Toll-lik...

Over the last few years, some of our experiments in which mycobacterial antigens were presented to the immune system as if they were viral antigens have had a significant impact on our understanding of protective immunity against tuberculosis. They have also markedly enhanced the prospects for new vaccines. We now know that individual mycobacterial protein antigens can confer protection equal t...

Mycobacterium bovis BCG is widely used as a vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), despite its variable protective efficacy. Relatively little is known about the immune response profiles following BCG vaccination in relation to protection against TB. Here we tested whether BCG vaccination results in immune responses to DosR (Rv3133c) regulon-encoded proteins. These so-called TB latency antigens are...

Melioidosis is a bacterial infection caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei. The aim of this study was to determine whether a cell-mediated adaptive immune response against B. pseudomallei developed in patients who had recovered from melioidosis. Lymphocyte proliferation assays were done on peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients (n=13) and control subjects (n=10) to determine the lymphoc...