The poultry immune system is a complex system involving many different cell types and soluble factors that must act in concert to give rise to an effective response to pathogenic challenge. The complexity of the immune system allows the opportunity for genetic regulation at many different levels. Cellular communication in the immune response, the production of soluble factors, and the rate of d...

Autism and schizophrenia are highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorders, each mediated by a diverse suite of genetic and environmental risk factors. Comorbidity and familial aggregation of such neurodevelopmental disorders with other disease-related conditions can provide important insights into their etiology. Epidemiological studies have documented reduced rates of rheumatoid arthritis, a ...

The systemic vasculitides (SV) are a heterogeneous group of rare affections characterized by a primary process of inflammation and damage of the blood vessel wall. Their etiopathogenesis is still unknown, but a complex interaction of multiple factors, such as age, sex, ethnic background, immunogenetic mechanisms and environmental influences, is probably involved. A genetic predisposition to SV ...

Exophiala species are ubiquitous dematiaceous yeast-like fungi of the order Chaetothyriales that bear melanin-like pigment in their cell wall that is responsible for their dark color and is thought to be a major fungal virulence factor [1–3]. Among the agents of phaeohyphomycosis (cutaneous, subcutaneous, and invasive infections caused by dark-walled fungi), most human Exophiala infections are ...

The immunogenetics of coeliac disease (CD) has advanced from “Bench to Bed” in the sense that HLA-DQ typing is now an established part of the diagnostic armamentarium. The configuration characteristics and the specificity of the HLA-DQ2, (1) -DQ8 (2, 3) and –DQ9 (4, 5) allow the binding of small peptides that cannot be further digested by the absence of specific human intestinal enzymes (6, 7)....

Graves' disease (GD) is the most common cause of thyrotoxicosis and often involves the orbits. Graves' ophthalmopathy (GO), also known as Thyroid Eye Disease (TED), can be clinically significant and advance to sight-threatening stages. Our knowledge of the immunogenetic pathophysiology of GO is rapidly expanding. The present review is an attempt to summarize the current state of knowledge on th...

We present an interactive query system applied to the specific problems of immunogenetics being undertaken with under international sponsorship (currently European with EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory)). The challenge is to adapt the models available in computer science (database conceptual models, grammars, formal models) to the specific area of genetic data with the objective of s...