Zika virus (ZIKV) is an emerging mosquito-borne flavivirus of significant public health concern. ZIKV shares a high degree of sequence and structural homology compared with other flaviviruses, including dengue virus (DENV), resulting in immunological cross-reactivity. Improving our current understanding of the extent and characteristics of this immunological cross-reactivity is important, as ZI...

Bacterial adherence to the acquired dental pellicle, important in dental caries (caries), is mediated by receptor-adhesins such as salivary agglutinin binding to Streptococcus mutans antigen I/II (I/II). Ten selected I/II epitopes were chosen to determine their reactivity to human salivary IgA. Previous studies suggested that a specific HLA biomarker group (HLA-DRB1*04) may have differential in...

To provide a convenient and sensitive method for the detection of equine arteritis virus (EAV)-specific serum antibodies, we developed an immunoblot assay employing the EAV nucleocapsid (N) and membrane (M) proteins expressed in a procaryotic expression vector (pMAL-c2) for the production of recombinant maltose-binding (MBP) fusion proteins (MBP-N and MBP-M). The antigenic reactivity of the rec...

a b s t r a c tintroduction: craving to methamphetamine is a significant health concern and exposure to methamphetamine cues in laboratory can induce craving. in this study, a task designing procedure for evaluating methamphetamine cue-induced craving in laboratory conditions is examined. methods: first a series of visual cues which could induce craving was identified by 5 discussion sessions b...

Sera from infected injection drug users (IDU) have shown to have antibodies against synthetic human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) envelope peptides more frequently. In this study, reactivity of 48 IDU plasma were compared to 60 plasmas obtained from sexually infected individuals (S). The overall reactivity of plasma from IDU compared to S was higher, and the reactivity titers were much highe...

BACKGROUND Infectious diseases are the most common and cost-intensive health complications associated with drug addiction. There is wide belief that drug-dependent individuals expose themselves more regularly to disease-related pathogens through risky behaviors such as sharing pipes and needles, thereby increasing their risk for contracting an infectious disease. However, evidence is emerging i...

The role of the immune response to measles virus in acute infection or in disease states associated with this virus is of major interest. The viral genome-specified surface antigens of measles, the hemagglutinin and fusion proteins, are likely to be of paramount importance with respect to the host immune response to the virus. This report describes initial studies aimed at assessing the immune ...

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS) has been introduced recently as a potentially common disease on the basis of studies of patients with claimed reactivity to gluten but without the characteristics of celiac disease (CD). CD is characterized by antibody reactivity toward the autoantigen transglutaminase 2, characteristic histological abnormalities of the small intestine, and an almost obligat...

Psychological stress is known to affect immune function and to predict infectious disease susceptibility. However, not all individuals who are stressed develop disease. In the present article, we report on a series of studies from our laboratory describing interindividual variability of immune responses to psychological stress. In our initial series of experimental investigations, we demonstrat...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is characterized by chronic and relapsing intestinal inflammation of unknown etiology, but immune activation by the commensal microbiota probably plays a major role. The two major categories of IBD are ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. One fifth of the cases present in childhood and Sweden has a high and rising incidence of pediatric IBD. The aim of this t...