Somatic hypermutation (SHM) of Ig variable region (IgV) genes requires both IgV transcription and the enzyme activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID). Identification of a cofactor responsible for the fact that IgV genes are much more sensitive to AID-induced mutagenesis than other genes is a key question in immunology. Here, we describe ...

Autoimmune diseases (AIDs) are believed to be multifactorial diseases that commonly involve multiple organ systems. About three fourth of the patients afflicted with AIDs are women suggesting that sex differences impact the incidence of AID. However, the proportion of females to males suffering from AID varies depending on the disease. ...

Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID/AICDA) is required for somatic hyper-mutation and class-switch recombination of the immunoglobulin gene, and for c-myc translocation of germinal center-derived B-cell lymphoma. In the present study, we attempted to clarify the significance of AID associated with c-myc in the progression of follicular lymphoma (FL) using RT-PCR and ...

The enzyme activation-induced deaminase (AID) deaminates deoxycytidine at the immunoglobulin genes, thereby initiating antibody affinity maturation and isotype class switching during immune responses. In contrast, off-target DNA damage caused by AID is oncogenic. Central to balancing immunity and cancer is AID regulation, including the mechanisms determining AID protein levels. We ...

Somatic hypermutation (SHM) and class-switch recombination (CSR) of the Ig gene require both the transcription of the locus and the expression of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID). During CSR, AID decreases the amount of topoisomerase I (Top1); this decrease alters the DNA structure and induces cleavage in the S region. Similarly, ...

Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) is a B lymphocyte-specific DNA deaminase that acts on the Ig loci to trigger antibody gene diversification. Most AID, however, is retained in the cytoplasm and its nuclear abundance is carefully regulated because off-target action of AID leads to cancer. The nature of the cytosolic AID ...

Activation-induced deaminase (AID) acts on the immunoglobulin loci in activated B lymphocytes to initiate antibody gene diversification. The abundance of AID in the nucleus appears tightly regulated, with most nuclear AID being either degraded or exported back to the cytoplasm. To gain insight into the mechanisms regulating nuclear AID, we ...

The generation of effective antibodies depends upon somatic hypermutation (SHM) and class-switch recombination (CSR) of antibody genes by activation induced cytidine deaminase (AID) and the subsequent recruitment of error prone base excision and mismatch repair. While AID initiates and is required for SHM, more than half of the base changes ...

Chromosome 3p21-22 harbors two clusters of chemokine receptor genes, several of which serve as major or minor coreceptors of HIV-1. Although the genetic association of CCR5 and CCR2 variants with HIV-1 pathogenesis is well known, the role of variation in other nearby chemokine receptor genes remain unresolved. We genotyped exonic ...

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Activation Induced cytidine Deaminase (AID) targets the immunoglobulin genes of activated B cells, where it converts cytidine to uracil to induce mutagenesis and recombination. While essential for immunoglobulin gene diversification, AID misregulation can result in genomic instability and oncogenic transformation. This is classically illustrated in Burkitt's lymphoma, which ...

Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) is induced in B cells during an immune response and is essential for both class-switch recombination (CSR) and somatic hypermutation of Ab genes. The C-terminal 10 aa of AID are required for CSR but not for somatic hypermutation, although their role in CSR is unknown. Using ...

Abstract We report our experience on rituximab-cyclophosphamide-dexamethasone (RCD) combination therapy for the treatment of autoimmune disorders in 48 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The diagnosis of autoimmune disease (AID) was autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA) in 26 (54%), autoimmune thrombocytopenic purpura (AITP) in nine (18.8%), Evans syndrome in eight (16.7%), ...

It is well known that negative intergroup emotions such as anger, fear, and hatred play a major role in initiating and maintaining intergroup conflicts. It is far less clear, however, what factors promote the resolution of intergroup conflicts. Using an emotion regulation- framework, we hypothesised that one form of emotion ...

Optimization is a powerful paradigm for expressing and solving problems in a wide range of areas, and has been successfully applied to many vision problems. Discrete optimization techniques are especially interesting since, by carefully exploiting problem structure, they often provide nontrivial guarantees concerning solution quality. In this paper, we review ...

BACKGROUND: COPD and asthma in older people are complex conditions associated with multiple clinical problems. The relative importance of these problems to both patients and physicians and the level of agreement between them is largely unknown. METHODS: Older people with asthma and COPD underwent a multidimensional assessment to characterise the ...

Patient compliance is essential to ensure efficacious treatment. The ease of topical drop delivery is of paramount importance. At least 50% of patients report difficulty in self-administration of topical ocular medicine. The two most frequently reported causes of difficulty include aiming the bottle and squeezing the bottle. The aims of ...

Foreign bodies in the ear, nose, and throat are commonly seen in family medicine, usually in children. Occasionally, orthodontic appliances or parts of orthodontic appliances are accidentally swallowed and have caused problems with either the airway or the gastrointestinal tract. The purposes of this article were to describe the type ...

Airway management in patients of faciomaxillary injury is of great concern to the anesthesiologist. Bag and mask ventilation and orotracheal intubation may be difficult with these patients. Recently, a middle aged, obese female presented in the emergency department after sustaining a blast injury, with laceration of the upper chest and ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the relationship between age, gender, socioeconomic status, and 3 chronic conditions (glaucoma, cataracts, and diabetes) and corrected and uncorrected vision problems, and to document the prevalence of visual problems in Canada across the adult age range. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, representative, population-based study. PARTICIPANTS: Health survey respondents (n = ...

People with severely restricted peripheral visual fields have difficulty walking confidently and safely in the physical environment. Augmented vision devices that we are developing for low-vision rehabilitation implement vision multiplexing, providing two views of the same scene at two different scales (sizes), with a cartooned minified wide view overlaying a ...

PURPOSE: Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most common cause of severe visual impairment, including loss of reading ability, among elderly persons in developed countries. The aim of the present study was to evaluate reading ability before and after providing of appropriate low vision aids. METHODS: Five hundred and thirty ...

To compare walking characteristics of individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) using a new walking aid, the WalkAbout, with usual walking. Fifteen subjects with PD were recruited. Subjects walked in their usual fashion and then walked again in the WalkAbout. Gait parameters, 5-min walk, and oxygen consumption were recorded. Stride lengths ...

INTRODUCTION: Congenital glaucoma is frequently associated with visual impairment due to optic nerve damage, corneal opacities, cataracts and amblyopia. Poor vision in childhood is related to global developmental problems, and referral to vision habilitation/rehabilitation services should be without delay to promote efficient management of the impaired vision. OBJECTIVE: To analyze ...

PURPOSE: To evaluate a low vision rehabilitation service implemented for heterogeneously diverse group of Egyptianpatients with vision loss in terms of improving their visual performance and fulfilling their visual needs. METHODS: Fifty patients with low vision were included in a prospective study. History taking, ophthalmic examinationand evaluation of the visual ...

The Abraham-Minkowski dilemma relates to the disputed value of the optical momentum within a dielectric medium and whether the free-space value should be divided (Abraham) or multiplied (Minkowski) by the refractive index. Although undoubtedly simplistic, these two approaches provide intuitive insight to many subtle problems in optical physics. This paper ...

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the relationship between uncorrected or untreated vision problems and occupational injuries in the adolescent and adult population in Australia. DESIGN: National Health Survey conducted via personal interviews with a stratified random sample. SETTING: Population-based. SUBJECTS: Individuals selected from the total population aged 15 or older. Exposure measures: ...

Background: Ethiopia lacked accurate recent national estimates of blindness and low vision. Therefore, prevention and control programs face serious problem of lack of recognition of the problem and challenges in tracking achievements towards program goals. Objective: To determine the prevalence of blindness and low vision at the national and regional ...

Vision looms large in neuroscience--it is the subject of a gigantic literature and four Nobel prizes--but there is a growing realization that there are problems with the textbook explanation of how mammalian vision works. Here we will summarize the evidence behind this disquiet. In effect, we shall present a portrait ...

In this study, we evaluated the effects of leaning posture on the kitchen counter, which was observed during dishwashing in a kitchen, on subjective discomfort and muscle activity in the low back and legs. Twelve female volunteers were asked to wash plates for 30 min in each of three working ...

The evolution of trichromatic color vision in primates may improve foraging performance as well as intraspecific communication; however, the context in which color vision initially evolved is unknown. We statistically examined the hypothesis that trichromatic color vision in primates represents a preexisting bias for the evolution of red coloration (pelage ...

Depth perception is a common problem for x-ray vision in augmented reality applications since the goal is to visualize occluded and embedded objects. In this paper we present an x-ray vision blending method for neurosurgical applications that intensifies the interposition depth cue in order to achieve enhanced depth perception. The ...

Visually impaired people rank obstacle location and identification as two of the most important mobility problems faced. Traditional mobility aids (the long cane) provide information about where an object is located but only within their limited (one metre) range. Although objects are located when traditional aids are used, it is ...

Topological indices of molecular graphs are related to several physicochemical characteristics; recently, the inverse problem for some of these indices has been studied, and it has some applications in the design of combinatorial libraries for drug discovery. It is thus very natural to study also extremal problems for these indices, ...

OBJECTIVE: To estimate the prevalence of self-reported visual impairment and its association with disabilities, handicaps, and socioeconomic consequences. METHODS: A national survey was conducted on a random stratified sample of 359 010 French citizens living in the community; 21 760 subjects were selected at random and 16 945 persons (78%) ...

AIM: To elicit problem statements describing the consequences of vision impairment as a first step towards the development of a vision related quality of life instrument for use in India METHODS: 46 focus groups were conducted in three regions of India. Separate focus groups were held for men and women ...

The watercolor illusion presents two main effects: a long-range assimilative color spreading (coloration effect), and properties imparting a strong figure status (figural effect) to a region delimited by a dark (e.g. purple) contour flanked by a lighter chromatic contour (e.g. orange). In four experiments, the strength of the watercolor illusion ...

PROBLEM: Safety belt use rates among front seat occupants of passenger vehicles are substantially lower at night than during the day despite the fact that night driving is more dangerous. METHOD: Recent advances in night vision equipment now make it possible to enforce belt use laws in darkness. Reading, Pennsylvania ...

Microsurgical training concentrates on the practical mechanisms of performing vessel anastomoses, with little attention given to medical problems that may adversely affect the trainee's performance. Undiagnosed vision problems are rarely considered in microsurgical training, and may not be manifested until other limiting factors, such as basic instrument and suture handling, ...

A Hepatitis A outbreak occurred in Mukim Hulu Langat, Hulu Langat district from April 2002 to October 2002. Of the 51 cases notified, most were among students and the ethnic groups involved were Malays and the Orang Asli (local indigenous community). Epidemiological investigations revealed that the cases were localized along ...

Previous research on entrepreneurship as well as goal, social-cognitive, and leadership theories has guided hypotheses regarding the relationship between entrepreneurial traits and skill (passion, tenacity, and new resource skill) and situationally specific motivation (communicated vision, self-efficacy, and goals) to subsequent venture growth. Data from 229 entrepreneur-chief executive officers and 106 ...

We investigated the prevalences and intercorrelations of all daily meat-inspection recordings at four Danish sow abattoirs in the year 2000 from 23,794 sows coming from 207 sow or farrow-to-finisher herds. The meat-inspection data were obtained from databases at the Danish Bacon and Meat Council (DBMC). Prevalences generally were low--but large ...

All people with abnormal colour vision, except for a few mildly affected deuteranomals, report that they experience problems with colour in everyday life and at work. Contemporary society presents them with increasing problems because colour is now so widely used in printed materials and in computer displays. Equal opportunity law ...

We study the graph coloring problem over random graphs of finite average connectivity c. Given a number q of available colors, we find that graphs with low connectivity admit almost always a proper coloring whereas graphs with high connectivity are uncolorable. Depending on q, we find with a one-step replica-symmetry ...

Self-selected walking speed is being increasingly used as a primary outcome measure in the management of neuromuscular disease. It would be useful if the speed recorded in the gait laboratory represented the child's walking speed in the community. This study investigated the difference in self-selected walking speeds between a 10-meter ...

In the original paper, Goldman et al. (2000) launched the study of the inverse problems in combinatorial chemistry, which is closely related to the design of combinatorial libraries for drug discovery. Following their ideas, we investigate four other topological indices, i.e., the sigma-index, the c-index, the Z-index, and the M(1)-index, ...

The problem of vertex coloring in random graphs is studied using methods of statistical physics and probability. Our analytical results are compared to those obtained by exact enumeration and Monte Carlo simulations. We critically discuss the merits and shortcomings of the various methods, and interpret the results obtained. We present ...

A design approach to low-vision device development-vision multiplexing-was introduced recently. This approach has been applied successfully to the design of novel electronic and optical low-vision aids. This paper discusses the application of the vision-multiplexing concept to spectacle lens design to address issues of low vision and to resolve problems of ...

In order to prevent low back pain during dishwashing, we developed a standing aid for supporting the forward bending posture, and then evaluated the effects of the standing aid on decreasing load on the low back and legs. Eight female volunteers were asked to wash plates for 60 minutes in ...

All over the world about 10 million people suffer from blindness caused by an opaque, irreversible damaged and inoperable cornea. Many of these people still have intact retinal functions. After Prof. Heimann of the University of Köln miniaturized and implantable displays might help such people to restore partially their vision. ...

This note shows that the Riemann-space interpretation of motion vision developed by Barth and Watson is neither necessary for their results, nor sufficient to handle an intrinsic coordinate problem. Recasting the Barth-Watson framework as a classical velocity-solver (as in computer vision) solves these problems.