微生物学技术

Cytokines are a family of immunoregulatory peptide growth factors. They are produced mainly by immune cells after immune challenge (infection/inflammation). Various cells of nonimmune cell origin such as epithelial, muscle, endothelial, fibroblast, and mesangial, and also spe ...

Cytokines are small-molecular-weight proteins that mainly function in soluble, secreted form. Cytokines regulate a wide variety of cellular functions, such as immune responses and the growth and differentiation of hemopoietic, epithelial, and mesenchymal cells (1,2). Typical f ...

Cytokines are important mediators of the persistent cycle of inflammation and repair that characterizes chronic airway diseases such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and cystic fibrosis (CF). Interleukin (IL)-5 is a key mediator of the eosinophil infiltra ...

In the history of clinical pathology, all the body fluids have been employed to examine several types of molecules. Obviously, the serum has always been the principle source of exploration, although other fluids, namely, urine, acqueous humor, cerebrospinal fluid, lymph, and others have also ...

Cytokines, low-molecular-weight glycoproteins with diverse bioactivities, are produced from local tissues and leukocytes in response to various stimuli and are involved in both physiologic and pathologic events. Cerebrospinal fluid is an informative material used to evalu ...

Over the last 20 years, advances in the knowledge of cytokine biology have brought a new dimension to the understanding of pathogenic events in human chronic arthritides, showing promise for future therapeutic approaches. Pathogenetically, it is likely that local and systemic manifes ...

The tear film provides a refractive optical surface of the eye and nutrients to the underlying epithelial cells; it also contains factors that protect the eye from invasion by foreign particles including microorganisms. The tear film can alter rapidly from a basal state that occurs during the d ...

Phosphoinositide 3-kinases (PI 3-kinases) are an evolutionarily conserved family of lipid kinases that have attracted much attention over the past 10 years or so (reviewed in ref. 1). Three PI 3-kinase classes have been defined on the basis of primary structure, regulation, and their in vitro li ...

Interleukin-2 (IL-2) was first discovered and characterized as T-cell growth factor (1). It is responsible for the growth of T cells and thus plays an important role in the proper functioning of the immune system. IL-2 has a high affinity receptor consisting of an α-, β-, and γ-chain. The γ- chain is shared with a n ...

The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a naturally fluorescing protein and its subsequent modification to allow easy detection with standard fluorescent equipment such as the fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS) has revolutionized our ability to detect the pr ...

An understanding of the structure and function of cytokines requires the availability of milligram to gram amounts of highly purified and biologically active cytokines. A variety of expression systems have been used to produce recombinant proteins, including Escherichia coli, Pi ...

Interleukins are soluble peptide molecules that mediate the interaction between immunocompetent and haematopoietic cells and between the immune and neuroendocrine systems (1). They are produced by a variety of activated cells and exert their biological activities by binding to s ...

The purpose of the gene array techniques is to simultaneously analyze the expression or characteristics of a large number of genes (1–3). These techniques can be used to compare gene expression in various cells or in the same cells following various treatments, to analyze function of multiple ge ...

This chapter describes several methods for recognizing apoptosis in tumor cells following infection with a replication-deficient adenovirus expressing the tumor suppressor gene p53. We include cytotoxicity assays and assays of apoptosis, including DNA-nucleosomal DNA fr ...

Oncolytic adenovirus (Ad) vectors belong to a new class of cancer therapy agents that destroy cancer cells as part of the virus’s lytic infectious cycle. In this chapter we describe an immunocompetent, semi-permissive cotton rat tumor model to evaluate the safety and efficacy of oncolytic Ad v ...

The enteric adenoviruses of subgroup F (Ad40 and Ad41) pose some special problems of cultivation, as they cannot be readily passaged in many of the cell types used to propagate the more commonly used subgroup C serotypes (Ad2 and Ad5) and there is no standard plaque assay. Methods to propagate Ad40 in com ...

Oncolytic adenoviruses (Ads) are promising candidates for cancer therapy. However, current animal models to evaluate these vectors have substantial limitations. Because Ad replication is generally species-specific, oncolytic Ads are usually examined in immunodeficient ...

A critical step in working with adenovirus (Ad) and its vectors is the accurate, reproducible, sensitive, and rapid measurement of the amount of virus present in a stock. Titration methods fall into one of two categories: determination of either the infectious or the particle (infectious plus n ...

Ribozymes are small catalytic RNAs with the ability to reversibly cleave covalent bonds in RNA in the complete absence of protein (1). With the exception of the RNA component of bacterial RNase P, presently characterized ribozymes catalyze a one-time intramolecular self-cleavage in the ...

Ribozymes are recognized as useful tools for the manipulation of genes because of their high specificity and the fact that they act without influencing the expression of genes that are unrelated targets (1,2). To date, many successful experiments with intracellular ribozymes have been re ...