The complement system is an ancient and critical effector mechanism of the innate immune system as it senses, kills, and clears infectious and/or dangerous particles and alerts the immune system to the presence of the infection and/or danger. Interestingly, an increasing number of reports have demonstrated a clear role for complement in the adaptive immune system as well. Of note, a number of r...

BACKGROUND It is believed that schistosomes evade complement-mediated killing by expressing regulatory proteins on their surface. Recently, six homologues of human CD59, an important inhibitor of the complement system membrane attack complex, were identified in the schistosome genome. Therefore, it is important to investigate whether these molecules could act as CD59-like complement inhibitors ...

We provide two new proofs of a theorem of Cooper, Long and Reid which asserts that, apart from an explicit finite list of exceptional manifolds, any compact orientable irreducible 3-manifold with non-empty boundary has large fundamental group. The first proof is direct and topological; the second is group-theoretic. These techniques are then applied to prove a string of results about (possibly ...

The complement system plays multiple pathogenetic roles in rejection of renal allografts and one of the components, C4d, is an important diagnostic marker of antibody mediated rejection (1, 2). Complement proteins (e.g., C3) arose as an ancient, innate defense system in invertebrates that preceded the adaptive immune system in phylogeny. It is not surprising that during evolution these compleme...

Several studies of human cancers have established that chronic and insidious inflammation promotes the process of carcinogenesis and exacerbates the growth of existing tumors. Conversely, acute inflammation seems to have the opposite effect. Recent discoveries indicate that this dualism in the role of inflammation in cancer is mirrored by the effects of the complement system on this disease pro...

In recent years it has become clear that inflammation and tissue destruction in central nervous system (CNS) disease is due, at least in part, to the activation of complement. Although often implicated in contributing to the pathology of diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzhei-mer's disease, and many others, how central the role of complement is to the pathology of these diseases remai...