Obesity represents a major threat to health and quality of life. Although obesity has strong genetic determinants, it is generally accepted that it results from an imbalance between food intake and daily physical activity. Health guidelines have been focused on 3 particular lifestyle factors: increased levels of physical activity and reductions in the intakes of fat and sugars. The dietary guid...

A temperature-dependent alteration in the synthesis of the group-specific polysaccharide was found to occur in two "variant" streptococcal strains, A-486-Var and C 121/46/4. These strains synthesize a polysaccharide with variant immunochemical characteristics when grown at 37 degrees C. However, when these organisms are grown at lower temperatures, 22 degrees C, an enhanced synthesis of Group A...

BACKGROUND Glycolipids have a natural ability to insert into red cell (RBC) membranes. Based on this concept the serology of RBCs modified with synthetic analogs of blood group glycolipids (KODE technology) was developed, which entails making synthetic glycolipid constructs engineered to have specific performance criteria. Such synthetic constructs can be made to express a potentially unlimited...

In prior studies, we demonstrated that glucuronoxylomannan (GXM), the major capsular polysaccharide of the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans, interacts with chitin oligomers at the cell wall-capsule interface. The structural determinants regulating these carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions, as well as the functions of these structures, have remained unknown. In this study, we demonstra...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains the largest cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world. Management of risk factors for CVD continues to be the primary prevention strategy to lower the incidence of CVD. One of the foremost challenges to CVD prevention is the rising prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) worldwide, which are potent risk factors for development of ather...

Despite the paradigm that carbohydrates are T cell-independent antigens, isotype-switched glycan-specific immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies and polysaccharide-specific T cells are found in humans. We used a systems-level approach combined with glycan array technology to decipher the repertoire of carbohydrate-specific IgG antibodies in intravenous and subcutaneous immunoglobulin preparations. A...

Molecular determinants of biological activity of gangliosides are generally believed to be carbohydrate in nature. However, our studies of immunomodulation by highly purified naturally occurring tumor gangliosides provide another perspective: while the immunosuppressive activity of gangliosides requires the intact molecule (both carbohydrate and ceramide moieties), ceramide structure strikingly...

Variations in the polyomavirus major capsid protein VP1 underlie important biological differences between highly pathogenic large-plaque and relatively nonpathogenic small-plaque strains. These polymorphisms constitute major determinants of virus spread in mice and also dictate previously recognized strain differences in sialyloligosaccharide binding. X-ray crystallographic studies have shown t...

Twenty lectins with different carbohydrate affinities, including five new lectins purified from fungi,were used for histochemical examination of carbohydrate determinants in rat ovaries and endometrium under experimental hyper- and hypothyroidism. In the ovaries of control rats, lectin binding was detected predominantly in the zona pellucida and corona radiata of growing follicles, luteocytes, ...