免疫学技术

The continued dominance of tuberculosis as a cause of morbidity and mortality (1) has fueled the search for more rapid and reliable means of diagnosis. Numerous systems have now been described for the amplification and detection of DNA or rRNA sequences that are specific for the Mycobacterium t ...

Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) is one of the leading bacterial pathogens causing illness and death among young children, the elderly, and persons with certain underlying medical conditions (1). Pneumococci are often part of the normal nasopharyngeal flora, especially ...

A highly conserved repeated DNA element has been identified in the chromosome of Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumococcus) and given the name of the BOX repetitive element (1). This was the first demonstration of the presence of such a repetitive DNA moiety in a Gram positive bacterial species. ...

Electrophoresis techniques have allowed for very effective separation of nucleic acids on the basis of molecular weight. Conventional DNA electrophoresis can only separate DNA fragments smaller than 50 kb. Above this size, DNA fragments are larger than the pore size of the matrix. They can t ...

Antimicrobial treatment of Klebsiella pneumoniae infections can be complicated by the existence of multiply-antibiotic resistant (multiresistant) strains carrying plasmids coding for extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs), AmpC-type β-lactamases (ACTBLs), or am ...

The production of the first “microscope” between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century was a true breakthrough in the advance of civilization (1). Without the microscope, the natural, biological, medical, and other sciences would not be what they are today. After the ...

Resistance to antibiotics in target bacterial populations has long complicated antibacterial chemotherapy. First described in the early 1980s (1, 2), efflux mechanism of resistance, whereby the antibiotic is actively (i.e., in an energy-dependent fashion) pumped from the bacteri ...

Luria and Delbruck identified that the frequency of mutation was subject to considerable fluctuation. They argued that the large fluctuation in the number of organism surviving exposure to bacteriophage meant that resistance was acquired through mutation rather than a physiolog ...

The classical method for determining the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) of an antibiotic is the tube test. Details of this test are well known and recognized methods are published (1). The recent development of the E-test (AB Biotest, S ...

Chapter 9 developed the concept of antibody clonality and described several methods that have been used to define antibody clonality in polyclonal sera. Affinity immunoblotting (1) has proven to be a powerful and high-resolution method for estimating clonality of immune responses to a v ...

Serum from normal individuals contains a repertoire of antibodies even in the absence of apparent immunization. The B-cell compartment of the immune system can recognize not only the antigens of the external environment, but also internal or self-antigens. Normal serum contains natur ...

The existence of opioid receptors as “narcotic analgesic binding components” in mammalian brain was first documented in the early 1970s (1–3). Shortly thereafter, endogenous opioid peptides (endorphins) that also bound to these receptors were found in mammalian brain tissue. Subse ...

In 1974, Niels Jerne (1) proposed a theory that pictured the immune system as a network of idiotypic-anti-idiotypic interactions regulating the immune response to an antigen. The theoretical basis for the construction of idiotypic structures mimicking external antigen results from ...

Despite major progress in various fields of chemical and molecular biology, generation of a synthetic molecule that possesses the catalytic qualities of enzymes has not been achieved. In order to overcome this obstacle, numerous attempts have been carried out to synthesize antibodies ...

Catalysis of various chemical transformations by antibodies opens broad perspectives in the fundamental and applied branches of life science (1). Antibodies are ideally suited for therapeutic applications owing to their capability of homing to a particular target. In addition, th ...

Monoclonal antibodies (MAb) with prespecified enzyme-like catalytic activity are obtained from the immune response against transition-state analogs (TSA). The premise for generating antibody catalysts, as put forth by Jencks (1), was validated through early examples of specif ...

The ability to make monoclonal rodent antibodies has revolutionized immunology. To reduce the immunogenicity of these antibodies for human in vivo use, methods have been developed to create artificial recombinant antibodies (1). Chimeric recombinant antibodies containing mo ...

The variable regions of antibody subunits are the “business ends” of these molecules responsible for interactions with antigens and activation of the biological functions of the constant regions. Rearrangement of variable-, diversity-, and joining-region genes and the hypermut ...

Antibodies to native B-DNA are common in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and their measurement serves as a diagnostic and prognostic marker of the disease (1). Autoreactive antibodies are also found in the sera of normal individuals (2). Natural autoantibodies crossreact with a vari ...

We have been collecting nucleotide and amino acid sequences of proteins of immunological interest, and aligning them in order to understand the structure and function relations of these proteins (1). To aid in organizing and analyzing this collection, a computer program, called SEQHUNT, w ...