Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a heterogeneous multifactorial systemic autoimmune disease affecting several organs. SLE can start relatively early in life and results in impaired quality of life and shortened life expectancy because of a gradual disease progression leading to cardiovascular, renal and neoplastic disease. The basic mechanisms of the pathogenesis of the disease still remai...

Disruption of angiotensin II type 1 (AT1) receptor prolonged life span in mice. Since aging-related decline in skeletal muscle function was retarded in Atgr1a(-/-) mice, we examined the role of AT1 receptor in muscle regeneration after injury. Administration of AT1 receptor blocker irbesartan increased the size of regenerating myofibers, decreased fibrosis, and enhanced functional muscle recove...

Sera from 91 adult acute nonlymphocytic leukemia patients were tested for circulating immune complexes by the C1q binding test. In 42 patients tested prior to the initiation of therapy, C1q binding activity was inversely correlated with leukemic infiltrate of the bone marrow (rs = -0.34, p less than 0.02), but it was not related to peripheral white blood cell count or presence of infection. Pat...

C1q nephropathy is a rare glomerular disease with characteristic mesangial C1q deposition noted on immunofluorescence microscopy. It is histologically defined and poorly understood. Light microscopic features are heterogeneous and comprise minimal change disease (MCD), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), and proliferative glomerulonephritis. Clinical presentation is also diverse, and ran...

Luminex single antigen bead (SAB) technology enables highly sensitive and rapid characterization of immunoglobulin G (IgG) human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-specific antibodies. It is widely used to determine antibody compatibility for renal transplantation and to aid the diagnosis of antibody-mediated rejection and response to therapy. HLA-specific antibodies may contribute to allograft rejection ...

ATTRV30M amyloid neuropathy is a lethal autosomal dominant sensorimotor and autonomic neuropathy, caused by deposition of amyloid fibrils composed of aberrant transthyretin (TTR). Ages of onset and penetrance exhibit great variability and genetic factors have been implicated. Complement activation co-localizes with amyloid deposits in amyloidotic neuropathy and is possibly involved in the kinet...

BACKGROUND Whereas the complement system alterations contribute to schizophrenia, complement receptors and regulators are little studied. We investigated complement receptor type 1 (CR1) expression on blood cells, the levels of circulating immune complexes (CIC) containing ligands of CR1, C1q complement protein and fragments of C3 complement protein (C1q-CIC, C3d-CIC), and CR1 C5507G functional...

C1, the complex that triggers the classical pathway of complement, is assembled from two modular proteases C1r and C1s and a recognition protein C1q. The N-terminal CUB1-EGF segments of C1r and C1s are key elements of the C1 architecture, because they mediate both Ca2+-dependent C1r-C1s association and interaction with C1q. The crystal structure of the interaction domain of C1s has been solved ...

BACKGROUND The medicinal leech is considered as a complementary and appropriate model to study immune functions in the central nervous system (CNS). In a context in which an injured leech's CNS can naturally restore normal synaptic connections, the accumulation of microglia (immune cells of the CNS that are exclusively resident in leeches) has been shown to be essential at the lesion to engage ...

The mechanism of killing of Aeromonas hydrophila serum-sensitive strains in nonimmune serum by the complement classical pathway has been studied. The bacterial cell surface component that binds C1q more efficiently was identified as a major outer membrane protein of 39 kDa, presumably the porin II described by D. Jeanteur, N. Gletsu, F. Pattus, and J. T. Buckley (Mol. Microbiol. 6:3355-3363, 19...