BACKGROUND Tools for plague diagnosis and surveillance are not always available and affordable in most of the countries affected by the disease. Yersinia pestis isolation for confirmation is time-consuming and difficult to perform under field conditions. Serologic tests like ELISA require specific equipments not always available in developing countries. In addition to the existing rapid test fo...

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a bacterial microorganism that frequently causes serious infection, particularly in children and the elderly. Protection against infection with S. pneumoniae is based mainly on the generation of antibodies to the pneumococcal capsular polysaccharides (caps-PS), but the mechanisms responsible for the generation of anticapsular antibodies remain incompletely understood...

A very sensitive experimental setup for accurate wavelength-dependent hyper-Rayleigh scattering (HRS) measurements of the molecular first hyperpolarizability beta in the broad fundamental wavelength range of 600 to 1800 nm is presented. The setup makes use of a stable continuously tunable picosecond optical parametric amplifier with kilohertz repetition rate. To correct for multi-photon fluores...

Hyper-immunoglobulin M (IgM) syndrome (HIGM) is a rare heterogeneous primary immune deficiency. We describe a patient with HIGM characterized by skewed production of serum IgG subclasses and normal somatic hypermutation. This case may represent a subgroup of HIGM type 4 that is characterized by a biased switching to the V-region proximal constant regions.

Paradoxical absence of a pro-thrombotic phenotype in a Mouse model of severe hyper-homocysteinemia. The study by Eğin and Akar [1] entitled, First observation of MTHFR 678C-A (Ala 222 Ala) single nucleotide polymorphism, in the recent issue of the Journal (2012; 29: 204-5) requires questioning its importance to thrombosis in the light of Dayal et al.'s findings in a mouse model [2]. I used to t...

The purpose of this study was to measure the level of anticardiolipin antibodies in preeclamptic pregnant women to verify a possible association between the presence of these antibodies and the development of the syndrome. A total of 36 pregnant women with preeclampsia and 19 women with normal pregnancy were evaluated. Anticardiolipin antibodies were determined by enzyme immunoassay. The reacti...

Anti-phosphocholine (PC) antibody mediated protection against many strains of Streptococcus pneumoniae, and hybridoma anti-PC antibodies protected mice from fatal infections with types 1 and 3 S. pneumoniae. Live types 1, 3, 5, 6A, and 19F S. pneumoniae had similar amounts of surface PC accessible to antibody. Furthermore, mice expressing the X-linked immunodeficiency (xid) of the CBA/N strain ...

Hyper-IgM syndrome (HIGM) is a heterogeneous condition characterized by impaired Ig class-switch recombination (CSR). The molecular defects that have so far been associated with this syndrome - which affect the CD40 ligand in HIGM type 1 (HIGM1), CD40 in HIGM3, and activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) in HIGM2 - do not account for all cases. We investigated the clinical and immunological...

Treatment of patients with coeliac disease with a low gluten containing diet (LGD) remains controversial. We have studied jejunal morphology and antigluten (AG) antibody titres by ELISA in patients on a LGD of 2.5-5 g/day for three to 14 months (median six months) and compared results with patients on a strict gluten free diet (GFD) for six to 27 months (median 13 months). We found no significa...

INTRODUCTION To investigate whether baseline levels of anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) or IgM rheumatoid factor (IgM-RF) and changes in the year thereafter are associated with disease activity, functional and radiographic outcome in early arthritis patients, and provide additional information over baseline autoantibody status. METHODS In 545 early arthritis patients ACPA and IgM-RF...