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Chromatin, long thought to be no more than a scaffold supporting DNA compaction inside the cell nucleus, has emerged in the last few years as a major regulatory element involved in the control of gene expression both acutely during interphase and programmatically throughout complex proces ...

RNA interference (RNAi) is a powerful, quick, and easy technique to reduce the expression of a particular gene. However, investigators need to consider several steps for the experiments, including the design of the siRNA, an efficient delivery method, and a means for monitoring the biological ...

Adipose tissue has emerged as a major endocrine organ producing a wide spectrum of hormones and factors that play crucial roles in regulating cell turnover and function, not only locally within the adipose tissue but also in the brain and other key metabolic organ systems. It is known that gene activ ...

The advent of soluble MHC multimer technology has allowed for the flow-cytometric direct identification of specific-MHC restricted antigen-specific T cells in mixed cell populations and also enabled the direct phenotyping and cloning of these cells at the same time. To date, MHC multim ...

T-cells specific for a particular antigen represent a small percentage of the overall T-cell population. Detecting the presence of antigen specific T-cells in patients, animal models or populations of cultured cells has presented a challenge to researchers. The T-cell capture method d ...

Because antigen-specific cells are the central coordinators of the immune response to infectious organisms, and the principal effector cells in autoimmune disease, there are many circumstances in which investigators may wish to examine the T-cell responses to particular antigen ...

Specific immune responses are mediated by activated CD4+ T-helper (Th) cells. Two major subsets, denoted Th1 and Th2, have been identified that are characterized by their distinctive cytokine secretion pattern and associated effector functions. The signature cytokines of Th1 and Th2 c ...

The recognition of a wide diversity of antigens by lymphocytes is made possible by the expression of a large range of highly variable antigen specific receptors, coded for by tandem arrays of genes, which undergo rearrangement during T- and B-cell development. The study of T-cell receptor (TCR) d ...

T-cell apoptosis is central to the resolution of chronic inflammation. Inhibition of this process of programmed cell death contributes to disease persistence in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. An understanding of T-cell apoptosis and its regulation is clearly important f ...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a description of classical symptoms that can be grouped together to be recognized as a common entity. However, the disease is more heterogeneous and is likely composed of many different, distinct diseases (1). This heterogeneity is of two types. First, the disease can ...

Collagen-induced arthritis in mice has been widely used to address questions of disease pathogenesis and to validate therapeutic targets for human rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis is normally observed about 3 wk after immunization with autologous or heterologous type II collagen ...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a polygenic and multifactorial disease. Many complex immunological and genetic interactions are involved in the final out come of the clinical disease. To understand the various disease pathways operating during the disease course, we need many different ...

Collagen-Induced Arthritis (CIA) is a complex model of autoimmune-mediated arthritis that is regulated by multiple genetic and environmental factors. CIA is induced in rats by immunization with native type II collagen and develops joint pathology similar to that of rheumatoid arthr ...

Type XI collagen (CXI) and cartilage oligomeric matrix protein (COMP) are minor components in cartilage, shown to be arthritogenic. CXI is a heterotrimeric triple helical fibrillar collagen and intermingled in the collagen fibers with type II (CII). COMP is the major noncollagenous prot ...

Antigen induced arthritis is a unilateral T-cell driven model caused by direct injection of an antigen into the knee joint of a FCA preimmunized animal. The chronicity is determined by antigen retention in avascular structures of the joint through charge mediated binding or antibody media ...

A chronic relapsing arthritis develops after a single subcutaneous injection of small amounts of pristane; the pristane induced arthritis (PIA) model in the rat. PIA is characterized by a sudden onset of disease 2 wk after induction. The main pathological features of PIA include edema accomp ...

Mice expressing the KRN T cell receptor transgene and the MHC class II molecule Ag7 (K/B�N mice) develop severe inflammatory arthritis, and serum from these mice causes similar arthritis in a wide range of mouse strains, owing to pathogenic autoantibodies to glucose-6-phosphate isomerase ...

Osteoarthritis (OA) is characterised by progressive erosion of articular cartilage with a number of associated degenerative processes within the joint. Animal models of OA provide the only feasible way to systematically study the development and progression of OA, in order to unders ...

In the last decade, the analysis of gene expression in tissues and cells has evolved from the analysis of a selected set of genes to an efficient high throughput whole-genome screening approach of potentially all genes expressed. Development of sophisticated methodologies such as microa ...

Differential display is one of the simplest techniques for discovering novel transcripts when comparing gene expression in biological systems. The method can be carried out on small amounts of total RNA and permits the simultaneous comparison of multiple independent samples in a sing ...