疾病及处理

The measurement of antibodies specific for the majority of infectious agents in various external secretions is important in the evaluation of potentially protective immune responses at various sites of pathogen entry. Importantly, due to differences in the isotypes of antibodies in ...

Mucosal tissues of the gastrointestinal and genitourinary tracts serve as major portals of HIV-1 transmission, and recent literature has highlighted the important role of these tissues in pathogenesis. However, our understanding of human mucosal T-cell responses remains limit ...

HIV vaccine research increasingly uses polychromatic flow cytometry as a tool to monitor T cell responses. The use of this technology allows for the analysis of highly defined subsets of cells with unique phenotypes and functions. Ultimately, such studies may identify surrogate markers ...

Neutralizing antibody (NAb) assays for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are used to study the immune response in infected individuals, to examine monoclonal antibodies and viral diversity, and to judge the potential value of candidate vaccine immunogens in preclinical and clini ...

Currently available assays for detecting HIV-1-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) are remarkable for their technical ease, sensitivity, and precision of measurement. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that CTL responses vary in their antiviral activity at the cl ...

Ex vivo enumeration of the absolute frequencies of antigen-specific T cells is key for evaluating the immunogenicity of T cell-based vaccines. Currently there are three methods that are widely used to quantify cellular immune responses: Enzyme-Linked Immuno Spot assay (ELISpot), Int ...

Mutational analysis of the viral genome is frequently used to study the role of sequence or structural elements in HIV-1 replication. Many laboratories that use this approach have occasionally come across revertant viruses that overcome an introduced defect either by restoration of the ...

The life cycle of HIV-1 can be affected in different manners by the various classes of antiviral agents. Genetic heterogeneity is a characteristic of this virus, which contributes significantly to the ability of the virus to generate mutations which overcome the efficacy of the drug therapy. T ...

HIV-1 in plasma represents the viral quasispecies replicating in the patient at any given time. Studies of HIV-1 viral RNA from plasma or other body fluids therefore reflect the virus present in real time. To obtain near full-length genomic sequences derived from virion RNA it is first necessary to ...

The presence of cellular proteins outside and inside retroviruses can indicate the roles they play in viral biology. However, experiments examining retroviruses can be complicated by the contamination of even highly purified virion preparations with nonviral particles (either ...

Studies of HIV-1 replication kinetics and fitness require an accurate determination of the level of infectious HIV-1 present in virus stocks. The standard technique for measuring the level of replication-competent infectious virus in culture supernatants or patient samples is the t ...

Imaging studies have benefited from the development of a novel technique for non-destructive labeling of proteins within living cells, based on the use of a reagent called FlAsH-EDT2, a bisarsenical derivative of fluorescein capable of binding with high affinity and specificity to a tetr ...

A discerning feature of the retrovirus lifecycle is the covalent integration of the viral reverse transcript into a chromosome within the infected cell. Integration is required for productive infection and therefore defines the viral integrase protein of human immunodeficiency ...

Virus assembly constitutes a key phase of the HIV-1 replication cycle. The assembly process is initiated by the synthesis of the Gag precursor protein, Pr55Gag, in the cytosol of the infected cell. After its synthesis, Pr55Gag is rapidly transported in most cell types to the plasma membrane (PM) wh ...

For many years it has been known that viral capsid proteins are capable of self-assembly, but increasing evidence over the past decade indicates that in cells HIV-1 capsid assembly occurs via a complex but transient series of steps requiring multiple viral–host interactions. To better unde ...

Avian influenza (AI) viruses have been isolated from a wide diversity of free-living avian species representing several orders. Isolations are most frequently reported from aquatic birds in the Orders Anseriformes and Charadriiformes, which are believed to be the reservoirs for all AI ...

Immunohistochemical methods are commonly used for studying the pathogenesis of the avian influenza (AI) virus by allowing the identification of sites of replication of the virus in infected tissues and the correlation with the histopathological changes observed. In this chapter, t ...

Reverse genetics is the creation of a virus from a full-length cDNA copy of the viral genome, referred to as an infectious clone, and is the most powerful genetic tool in modern virology. The generation of influenza A viruses by reverse genetics has lagged mainly due to the inherent technical difficul ...

The measurement of avian cellular immunity is critical to understanding the role and regulation of avian lymphocytes following avian influenza (AI) virus infection. Although the ability to measure avian T cell responses has steadily increased over the last few years, few studies have ex ...

Functional and molecular techniques have both been employed to measure the production of cytokines following influenza infection. Historically, the use of functional or antibody-based techniques was employed in mammalian immunology. In avian immunology, only a few commercial ...