In the last few years it has been shown that the humoral immune response in cancer patients is a rich source of putative cancer vaccine candidates. To fully explore the complex information present within the Ab repertoire of cancer patients, we have applied a method, serological Ag selection, to molecularly define tumor Ags recognized by the humoral immune response in colorectal cancer (CRC). F...

The ‘dear enemy phenomenon’ (DEP) is a form of neighbour–stranger discrimination in which resident territorial individuals respond less agonistically to intrusions by known neighbouring conspecifics than they do to strangers. We tested philopatric female yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) for the presence of DEP. We hypothesized that dominant females discriminated between the anal gl...

Aptamers have emerged as promising molecular probes for disease diagnosis and therapy. In the present study, the entire live cell-SELEX method was used to generate gastric cancer cell‑specific aptamers. Human gastric carcinoma AGS cells were used as target cells for positive selections and human normal gastric epithelial GES-1 cells as the negative cells for counter selections. The selection pr...

BACKGROUND Alagille syndrome (AGS) is a dominantly inherited multisystem disorder involving the liver, heart, eyes, face, and skeleton, caused by mutations in Jagged1. Intracranial bleeding is a recognized complication and cause of mortality in AGS. There are multiple case reports of intracranial vessel abnormalities and other vascular anomalies in AGS. The objective of this study was to charac...

Molecular mimicry manifests antagonistically with respect to the specificity of immune recognition. However, it often occurs because different Ags share surface topologies in terms of shape or chemical nature. It also occurs when a flexible paratope accommodates dissimilar Ags by adjusting structural features according to the antigenic epitopes or differential positioning in the Ag combining si...

A whole genome scale proteome array consisting of 908 open reading frames encoded in Chlamydia trachomatis genome and plasmid was used to profile anti-chlamydial Ab responses. A total of 719 chlamydial proteins was recognized by one or more antisera from 99 women urogenitally infected with C. trachomatis. Revealing such a large C. trachomatis ANTIGENome in humans might partially be attributed t...

Widely-used document speciication languages like, e.g., SGML and XML, model documents using extended context-free grammars. These diier from standard context-free grammars in that they allow arbitrary regular expressions on the right-hand side of productions. To query such documents, we introduce a new form of attribute grammars (extended AGs) that work directly over extended context-free gramm...

objective: in an attempt to develop safer and more effective gene therapy approaches as a realistic treatment for various forms of cancer, researchers are increasingly using tumor-specific promoters (tsp) to drive the expression of the gene of interest and eradicate cancer cells. in this study, for the first time we introduce the oct-4 promoter as a cancer-specific promoter with a high efficacy...

Aminoglycoside antibiotics (AGs) are severely ototoxic. AGs cause degeneration of outer hair cells (OHCs), leading to profound and irreversible hearing loss. The underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. OHC survival critically depends on a specific K+ conductance (I(K,n)) mediated by KCNQ4 (Kv7.4) channels. Dysfunction or genetic ablation of KCNQ4 results in OHC degeneration and deafness...

Alagille syndrome (AGS) is often associated with symptoms of maldigestion, such as steatorrhea, hypotrophy and growth retardation. Exocrine pancreatic insufficiency was proposed as the underlying cause. We aimed to assess the exocrine pancreatic function with the use of different methods in AGS patients. Concentrations of fecal elastase-1 (FE1) and fecal lipase (FL) activities were measured in ...