The sugar units of glycan structures store information and establish an alphabet of life. The language of the oligosaccharide coding units is deciphered by receptors such as lectins and the decoded message can be transduced by multiple signaling pathways. Similar to glycoconjugates, these receptors can exhibit pronounced changes in quantitative and qualitative aspects of expression, as attested...

We explored the attachment of an H16N3 influenza virus to human, mallard, and gull tissues using virus histochemistry applied to tissue microarrays and employing human and mallard viruses as references. Of the viruses tested, the H16N3 gull virus most readily attached to the human respiratory tract and eye. These results underscore the need to assess the potential for gull influenza viruses to ...

BACKGROUND Repeated exposure to inhaled allergen can cause airway inflammation, remodeling and dysfunction that manifests as the symptoms of allergic asthma. We have investigated the role of the cytokine interleukin-13 (IL-13) in the generation and persistence of airway cellular inflammation, bronchial remodeling and deterioration in airway function in a model of allergic asthma caused by chron...

Extrafusab muscle fibers maintain uniform structural and histochemical characteristics over their entire length (4). This is unlike the behavior of intrafusal muscle fibers in mammalian muscle spindles that display regional structural and histochemical differences along the fiber length as shown by Banks et al. (1) and Kucera (8). In this study it has been noted that some intrafusal muscle fibe...

Although, ideally, enzyme histochemistry should be performed on unfixed sections, so as to avoid potential artifacts inherent in chemical fixation, it is usually considered necessary to fix sections so as to stop the 'soluble' enzymes from becoming lost into the incubation medium. However, provided that suitable frozen sections are used, alkaline phosphatase can be demonstrated fully in unfixed...

The ability to attach to host cells is one of the main determinants of the host range of influenza A viruses. By using virus histochemistry, we investigate the pattern of virus attachment of both a human and an avian influenza virus in colon and trachea sections from 12 wild bird species. We show that significant variations exist, even between closely related avian species, which suggests that ...

A combination of the glucose oxidase-diaminobenzidine (DAB) method and the DAB-nickel method can successfully bring out details of immunoreactive structures in immunostained preparations. It is especially beneficial for visualizing fibers and terminals.