The usefulness of supplementary dietary L-carnitine as an immunomodulator to increase antigen-specific antibody levels was analysed in 2-6-week-old broilers. The chickens received commercial feeds either unsupplemented (starter feed 17.8 mg carnitine/kg, finisher diet 22.9 mg carnitine/kg) or supplemented with L-carnitine (100 mg carnitine/kg added to feed). At 14 d of age, both groups were dis...

Little is known concerning the role of T cells in regulating an anti-polysaccharide Ig response to an intact pathogen. We previously reported that the in vivo Ig responses to Streptococcus pneumoniae (strain R36A), specific for pneumococcal surface protein A (PspA) and for the phosphorylcholine (PC) determinant of C-polysaccharide, were both dependent on TCR-alphabeta(+) T cells and B7-dependen...

Deletion derivatives of phage Mu which replicate as multicopy plasmids, and also transpose and package like Mu, have been developed for the in vivo cloning of bacterial genes. We show here that these miniMu plasmid phage are also efficient at generalized transduction and that both in vivo cloning and generalized transduction of a given gene can be accomplished in a single experiment.

Parent-specific differentially methylated regions (DMRs) are established during gametogenesis and regulate parent-specific expression of imprinted genes. Monoallelic expression of imprinted genes is essential for development, suggesting that imprints are faithfully maintained in embryos and adults. To test this hypothesis, we targeted a reporter for genomic methylation to the imprinted Dlk1-Dio...

Ig-PLP1 and Ig-PLP-LR are chimeric Igs expressing proteolipid protein (PLP)-derived T cell agonist (PLP1) and antagonist (PLP-LR) peptides, respectively. Both chimeras, like free PLP1 and PLP-LR peptides, induce in vivo-specific T cell responses. However, the responses induced by Ig-PLP1 and Ig-PLP-LR were cross-reactive with both PLP1 and PLP-LR peptides, while those induced by free peptides w...

A rat monoclonal antibody specific for immunoglobulin (Ig) heavy chain binding protein (BiP) has allowed the examination of the association of BiP with assembling Ig precursors in mouse B lymphocyte-derived cell lines. The anti-BiP monoclonal antibody immunoprecipitates BiP along with noncovalently associated Ig heavy chains. BiP is a component of the endoplasmic reticulum and binds free intrac...

Methods Our prospective study included eighty-eight asthmatic children, with ages between 1 and 18 years, who were admitted to the Clinic of Pediatrics I from Târgu Mureş, Romania, between October 2008 and June 2010. We analyzed the age, month of birth, sensitization to a given antigen (Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus, Dermatophagoides farinae, milk proteins, egg, mold, dog epithelium, cat epith...

The transmission performance for a downlink mobile WiMAX system with multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems in a computer simulation and field experiment is described. In computer simulation, a MU-MIMO transmission system can be realized by using the block diagonalization (BD) algorithm, and each user can receive signals without any signal interference from other users. The ...

The MuA transposase of phase Mu is a large modular protein that plays a central role in transposition. We show that the Mu end DNA-binding domain, I beta gamma, which is responsible for binding the DNA attachment sites at each end of the Mu genome, comprises two subdomains, I beta and I gamma, that are structurally autonomous and do not interact with each other in the absence of DNA. The soluti...