We prospectively studied 156 patients with a diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia requiring admission. Several respiratory specimens were obtained for the detection of Chlamydia pneumoniae by cell culture and PCR. Three serum samples were obtained from each patient. Serological diagnosis of a C. pneumoniae infection was determined by the microimmunofluorescence (MIF) test, the complement f...

A novel ELISA assay for the detection of anti-hepatitis C virus antibodies in the sera of infected individuals is described. This assay is based on a mixture of three 15-amino acid synthetic peptides encompassing regions of core and NS4 proteins of hepatitis C virus. Comparison with other available ELISA assays based on recombinant polypeptides shows that, short synthetic peptides have the adva...

Hepatitis C virus infects over 15 million patients from India and 2.86 million from Brazil. Detection of anti-hepatitis C virus antibodies has limited sensitivity during acute phase: the pre-seroconversion window period. Hepatitis C virus-RNA detection techniques are used to overcome this shortfall, but are costly and unavailable widely in developing countries. Estimation of hepatitis C virus c...

Campylobacter jejuni is a foodborne pathogen and a leading cause of diarrhoea worldwide. It is believed that a cholera toxin-like toxin (CTLT) produced by C. jejuni may mediate watery diarrhoea. However, the production of a CTLT by C. jejuni is controversial. A cholera toxin gene (ctx) homologue has not been identified in Campylobacter species. We investigated the identity of the CT cross-react...

The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) is the diagnostic test most commonly used in efforts to control paratuberculosis in domestic ruminants. However, commercial ELISAs have not been validated for detecting antibodies against Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis in wild animals. In this study, we compared the sensitivities and specificities of five ELISAs using individual serum s...

The potential of Cooperia oncophora excretory/secretory (ES) proteins as antigens in a serological assay which aims to establish exposure levels in cattle was assessed. ES proteins were analyzed by one- and two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and immunoblotting. The N-terminal domains of two ES proteins were sequenced, and the corresponding cDNAs were cloned. Two cDNAs, designate...

OBJECTIVE This paper aims to develop a monoclonal antibodies (MAbs)- based ELISA for detecting Chlamydophila pneumoniae (C. pneumoniae) antigens in humans with the variable domains (VD) 2 and 3 of the major outer membrane protein (MOMPVD2-VD3) and to assess its sensitivity and specificity by comparing with a widely used MAb that is able to recognize the elementary bodies of C. pneumoniae. MET...

Duck circovirus was a newly discovered pathogen that causing ducks immunosuppression in recent years, but it can not been cultured in vitro that limited its depth study. In the present study, the Cap gene that defect the nuclear localization signal (NLS) of DuCV was amplified and connected to the express vector pET-32a (+), to express the recombinant Cap protein in the bacterium Escherichia col...

MJ Martin, Met Office, Exeter, UK. M Balmaseda, ECMWF, Reading, UK L Bertino, NERSC, Bergen, Norway P Brasseur, LEGI, Grenoble, France G Brassington, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia J Cummings, NRL, Monterey, USA Y Fujii, JMA/MRI, Tsukuba, Japan DJ Lea, Met Office, Exeter, UK J-M Lellouche, Mercator Ocean, Toulouse, France K Mogensen, ECMWF, Reading, UK P Oke, CSIRO, Hobart, Austral...

In this paper, we employ the view model given by Bertino to propose a new design approach for a secure multi-level object-oriented database system. The central idea is to provide the user with a multi-level view derived from a single-level secure object-oriented database. Hence the database operations performed on the multi-level views are decomposed into a set of operations on the single-level...