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Escherichia coli K1 and Group B Streptococcus (GBS) are the most common bacteria that cause meningitis during the neonatal period. Complement, the first line of defence in the host, acts on these bacteria to opsonize with various components of complement for subsequent presentation to phagocytes. To counteract these opsonization effects, E. coli and GBS bind to the complement regulators C4 binding

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) affects millions of people world wide causing considerable human suffering and large socioeconomic costs. Increased knowledge of pathological pathways involved in RA will enable development of modern drugs, with reduced side effects. The mouse models offer an attractive approach to dissect the genetic and molecular mechanisms of RA.

Many Gram-positive bacteria express surface proteins that bind human plasma proteins. These bacterial proteins, and derivatives of them, are of interest for analysis of bacterial pathogenesis and as immunochemical tools. Well-characterized examples include the IgG-binding reagents staphylococcal protein A and streptococcal protein G, and the recently described streptococcal IgA-binding peptide Sap

Background Chronic immune stimulation appears to be associated with lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma (LPL)-Waldenström macroglobulinemia (WM); however, available information is sparse. We conducted, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive study to date to evaluate associations between a personal or family history of many immune-related and/or inflammatory disorders and the subsequent risk of LPL-WM. Me

Primary immunodeficiencies (IDs) are caused by inherited genetic defects leading to intrinsic defects in cells of the immune systems. Most IDs are rare diseases and can be difficult to diagnose because similar symptoms characterize several disorders. Mutation detection is the most reliable method in such cases. These tests are not available at most centers and physicians can have difficulties in f

The effect of the spatial distribution of hydrophobic surface residues on the adsorption of a weakly hydrophobic polymer to proteins has been examined using a coarse-grain model solved by Monte Carlo simulations. A given number of surface sites were distributed randomly on the protein surface subjected to a distance constraint. Five protein classes for which the minimum distance between the sites

Studies from our and other laboratories have over the last 2 years implicated the existence of multipotent progenitors (MPPs) with combined granulocyte-macrophage, B cell, and T cell potential, but little or no megakaryocyte-erythroid (MkE) potential in the adult bone marrow Lineage (-)SCA-1 +KIT+ (LSK) compartment of multipotent stem and progenitor cells. The evidence for the existence of LSKCD34

This study is the second part of a larger work with the purpose to distinguish, describe and discuss the discourses around music education in school. The first part focused on how adolescents in secondary school talk abot music education, and the second part is concerned with teaching ideologies and discources among teachers and teacher education students. An overarching purpose of the two studies

We investigate a means of explaining the apparent paucity of red giantstars within post-core-collapse globular clusters. We propose thatcollisions between the red giants and binary systems can lead to thedestruction of some proportion of the red giant population, by eitherknocking out the core of the red giant or by forming a common envelopesystem which will lead to the dissipation of the red gian

Thread-Level Speculation has been used to take advantage of multicore processors in virtual execution environments for the sequential JavaScript scripting language. While the results are promising the memory overhead is high. Here we propose to reduce the memory usage by limiting the checkpoint depth based on an in-depth study of the memory and execution time effects. We also propose an adaptive h

In the spectral region 2400-3160A of Eta Carinae, we have identifiedapproximately 500 absorption lines each with up to twenty velocitycomponents.The -512 km/s component is truely unique as 1) the typicalline width is <3 km/s, 2) the identified lines are in Fe I, Fe II, VII and Ti II, and 3) the lines originate from lower levels up to 2000cm-1 above the ground level. We have measured the velocity c

This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spon- taneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boun- dary tones are enhanced to mark information struc- turing. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a proso