objectives: it was aimed to investigate the effects of different doses of follicle stimulating hormone (fsh) and activin a on the growth and maturation of preantral mouse follicles during the in vitro culture. methods: preantral follicles (90-100 µm in diameter) were harvested from 6-8 week-old syrian mice and cultured in tcm199 culture medium for 6 days to see the effect of fsh and activin a. ...

Mice rendered deficient for interleukin (IL) 6 by gene targeting were evaluated for their response to T cell-dependent antigens. Antigen-specific immunoglobulin (Ig)M levels were unaffected whereas all IgG isotypes showed varying degrees of alteration. Germinal center reactions occurred but remained physically smaller in comparison to those in the wild-type mice. This concurred with the observa...

Research on the germinal center has tried to unravel the mechanisms that control its dynamics. In this study we focus on the termination of the germinal center reaction, which is still an open problem. We propose two hypothetical biological mechanisms that may be responsible for the control of germinal center dynamics and analyze them through mathematical models. The first one is based on the d...

Germinal centers are structures that promote humoral memory cell formation and affinity maturation, but the triggers for their development are not entirely clear. Activated extrafollicular B cells can form IgM-producing plasmablasts or enter a germinal center reaction and differentiate into memory or plasma cells, mostly of the IgG isotype. Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) induces both types of...

The specific morphology of germinal centers is analyzed in the context of the optimization of the humoral immune response. The relevance of dark and light zones for the affinity maturation process is investigated in the framework of a theoretical model for the germinal center reaction. Especially, it is shown that an intermediate appearance of dark zones in germinal center reactions is advantag...

SUMMARY Studies were made of the germinal development in the mother and daughter sporocysts of C. elephantis in experimental infections *of the snail intermediate host. A few infections of another species with a much larger cercaria also developed in the experimentally infected snails . Very rapid multiplication of the germinal cells takes place in the early stages of the mother sporocysts and ...

The fungicidal activity of pentachlorophenol and its derivatives against 16 species of fungi representing 14 genera was tested. In relation to pentachlorophenol, no increase in fungistatic activity was found for pentachloroanisole, pentachloronitrobenzene, hexachlorobenzene, pentachlorophenyl acetate, o- and p-chloranil, the three isomeric chlorophenols, 2,6-dichlorophenol, the three isomeric t...