BACKGROUND Antibodies against Ro-52 have been described in patients with a broad spectrum of autoimmune disease, most commonly in association with anti-Ro-60 in systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjogrens syndrome. However, in inflammatory myositis anti-Ro-52 is frequently present without anti-Ro-60 and is closely linked to the presence of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase (aats) antibodies. To date ther...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the titers of anti-Ro/SS-A (Ro) antibodies fluctuate during the course of SLE and Sjögren's syndrome (SS) in parallel with disease activity, and if such fluctuations could be used to predict disease flares. We also evaluated whether the anti-Ro profile (anti-Ro 52, anti-Ro 60) changes over time, since such information could provide new insights into the induction ...

OBJECTIVE To correlate the clinical course of the disease with the titer, the isotype profile and the switch of the anti-Ro/SSA antibodies in a cohort of patients affected by UCTD. METHODS One hundred selected patients with anti-Ro/SSA antibodies detected by counterimmunoelectrophoresis (CIE), and affected by UCTD with a mean follow-up of 7.6 years (SD 4.8 yrs.), were studied. The titer of Ig...

In this work, we propose a systematic method to evaluate and compare the performance of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). The need for such a method is justified by the fact that various types of PUFs have been proposed so far. However, there is no common method that can fairly compare them in terms of their performances. We first propose three generic dimensions of PUF measurements. We the...

Autoantibodies directed at the intracellular Ro ribonucleoprotein complex are found in the serum of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and related autoimmune diseases. The antigenic stimulus for the induction of these autoantibodies is unknown, although we have previously demonstrated that the Ro protein and immunoglobulin G (IgG) share immunologic determinants bound by anti-Ro an...

The fine specificity of a reference human anti-Ro/SSA autoantibody-containing serum has been analyzed by using sequential overlapping octapeptides from the human 60-kDa Ro/SSA antigen. From preliminary data, the most antigenic octapeptide in the carboxyl-terminal 120 amino acid residues of Ro/SSA shares seven of eight amino acids with the nucleocapsid (N) protein from the Indiana serotype of ve...

Wastewater produced by the crew members on a long-term space mission needs to be recovered as potable water. Reverse osmosis (RO) has long been in use as a physical membrane separation technology for wastewater treatment. However, membrane fouling and concentration polarization have limited the efficiency for high recovery reverse osmosis systems. An advanced high pressure rotating RO device wa...

Reverse osmosis (RO). has become a standard unit operation in Chemical Engineering. This separation process can be used for a wide variety of applications including: desalination of sea water, treatment of industrial wastes, concentration of food products, and recovery of value materials from solution mixtures. In order to best utilize RO it is necessary to have a fundamental understanding of t...

In this report, experimental investigation of waste water treatment by reverse osmosis to enable its reuse in cooling tower is presented. A polyamide spiral wound RO membrane followed by three filters as RO pretreatment (two activated carbon and one cartridge filter) and samples of Tehran refinery treated waste water have been used. The effect of operating conditions such as pressure differ...