疾病及处理

Hepatitis B virus (HBV)-specific CD8+ T cells, or cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), are believed to play an important role in the control of infection and development of liver injury (1). Therefore the quantitative and qualitative analyses of such cells is important for understanding the mecha ...

Chronic infection with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) is estimated to affect 350 million persons worldwide and continues to be an important cause of morbidity and mortality (1). It is generally accepted that the host immune response plays a key role in the course and outcome of HBV infection. In chronic HBV ...

The discovery of hepatitis B virus (HBV) four decades ago initiated the progressive increase in knowledge of an important hepatotropic infectious agent that culminated in the design of the first successful recombinant vaccine for a human infectious disease. Despite this medical achi ...

With an estimated 350 million chronic carriers, hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection still represents a global health care problem. In particular, HBV is the most common cause of hepatocellular carcinoma worldwide. Replication of HBV has been extensively studied in transfected hepatoma ...

Although our knowledge of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) life cycle has increased tremendously during the past 20 yr, the early steps of human HBV infection are still poorly understood. This is partly caused by the lack of a suitable cell culture system. Established hepatoma cell lines (e.g., HepG2 or Huh7) ...

Hepatocytes are the site of the most vigorous replication and virion assembly in the course of a serologically evident hepadnavirus infection. They also support persistent propagation of small quantities of hepadnavirus that continues as a serologically unapparent (occult) inf ...

Many kinds of vectors for gene transfer have been developed in the last 20 yr. These include viral vectors such retroviruses (1,2), adenoviruses (3,4), and adeno-associated viruses (5); nonviral vectors utilizing cell-specific recognizing components (6,7); and lipid-mediated lipos ...

Hepadnaviruses (1) are essentially hepatotrophic, and hepatocytes are the main site of viral replication. Other cells of the same embryonic origin such as the biliary epithelial cells are able to efficiently replicate the virus but represent only a very minor proportion of total liver. The v ...

The detection of antibodies to Shiga toxin (Stx)-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) antigens serves varied purposes: (1) the etiologic diagnosis of acute hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) and hemorrhagic colitis (HC) in the clinical laboratory; (2) epidemiological investigatio ...

Production of a member of the Shiga toxin (Stx) family is a sine qua non of virulence for Shiga toxigenic Escherichia coli (STEC), and therefore polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification of stx genes is, unquestionably, a definitive diagnostic procedure. Moreover, PCR is extremely sens ...

In order to investigate the relatedness of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli STEC strains isolated from outbreaks or sporadic cases, traditional methods of strain typing, such as serotyping and bacteriophage typing, have been used. However, newer molecular typing methods ha ...

Since the first outbreak caused by Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) of serovar O157:H7 in 1982, this agent has emerged as a food-borne pathogen leading to hemorrhagic colitis (HC), hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP). In additi ...

Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) are important human pathogens causing severe clinical syndromes in a high percentage of infected individuals (see Chapter 1). Naturally acquired STEC infections have also been detected in a wide spectrum of animal species (cattle, she ...

Cellular microbiology defines an emerging discipline that brings together the study of pathogenic microbes with eurkaryotic cell biology in order to investigate in detail the complex interactions that occur between pathogen and host during the process of disease. Over the years, we ha ...

In general, virulent bacteria are distinguished from nonvirulent ones by the presence of genes-encoding virulence factors. Virulence genes might be detected by polymeraase chain reaction (PCR) or hybridization, which also allows the identification of attenuated pathogenic s ...

Continuously automated synchronization of Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites can be achieved by culturing in a custom temperature-cycling incubator (TCI) whose process controller is programmed to periodically change between three different temperatures:

The study of plasmodial liver stage parasites, in vivo, has been hampered by the relatively small number of liver stage schizonts that can be generated in an animal. This has been true even when large numbers of sporozoites are injected. The number of liver stage parasites can be increased, by increas ...

The isolation of intact functional hepatocytes is a relatively recent innovation in cell biology, as compared to the isolation of cells from other organs. First successfully accomplished in the late 1960s, isolation of viable hepatocytes has become an increasingly utilized techniq ...

During the life cycle of the malaria parasites in mammals, sporozoites invade hepatocytes, and give rise to thousands of merozoites that are able to infect red blood cells. Invasion of the liver cells is thus a critical step by which infection becomes established in the host, and against which an anti ...

In vitro infection of hepatocyte monolayer cultures with plasmodial sporozoites has become a valuable tool for the dissection of host-cell parasite interactions (1-4). This methodology has facilitated the study of how antibodies, cytokines, drugs, and immune effector cells can inf ...