Prevalence of abortion is higher in women with autoimmune thyroid disease. In the majority of cases, however, no abnormality of thyroid function is detected despite the high levels of antithyroid antibodies. The direct influence of such harmful autoantibodies in female reproductive organs may serve a role in pregnancy loss. In this study, expression of thyroglobulin in the reproductive tissues ...

An efficient, single-step method for isolating highly purified toxin A from Clostridium difficile culture filtrates is described. The purification procedure was based on the affinity binding and release of toxin A to bovine thyroglobulin conjugated to agarose beads. The toxin strongly bound at 4 degrees C to the carbohydrate binding determinant Gal alpha 1-3Gal beta 1-4GlcNAc, a carbohydrate se...

Objective The tendency to autoimmune diseases has been reported to be increased in beta thalassemia minor (BTM). The aim of this study was to evaluate whether thyroid autoimmunity is higher in BTM. Methods Patients with BTM (n=86) and a healthy control group (n=93) were included in this cross-sectional case-control study. The two groups were compared in terms of anti-thyroglobulin (anti-TG) a...

Thyroglobulin is a large protein present in all vertebrates. It is synthesized in the thyrocytes and exported to lumen of the thyroid follicle, where its tyrosine residues are iodinated . The iodinated thyroglobulin is reintegrated into the cell and processed (cleaved to free its two extremities) for thyroid hormone synthesis. Thyroglobulin sequence analysis has identified four regions of the m...

AIMS Strong thyroglobulin immunoreactivity within sinus histiocytes in a lymph node draining a papillary thyroid carcinoma was observed in a recent case. This prompted the investigation of whether thyroglobulin immunoreactivity is common in regional lymph nodes in cases of thyroid malignancy. METHODS Eighty seven lymph nodes were studied from 21 cases of thyroid malignancy. These comprised pa...

The network theory of the immune system proposes that idiotype-anti-idiotype interactions provide important immunoregulatory controls (1). In many experimental systems, the passive administration of heterologous anti-idiotypic ant ibody has been shown to enhance (2) or suppress (3) immune responses. In addition, spontaneous auto-anti-idiotypic antibody has been detected after antigenic challeng...

A key challenge in diagnostic pathology is to provide accurate and precise diagnostics with limited excised tissue. It is also increasingly important to test the tissue samples against multiple markers to enhance the confidence in results and sub-type the diseases for personalized treatment therapies. To this end, we performed local chemical reactions and staining on tissue sections using a sca...

We have used DNase I footprinting to examine the interaction of several triplex-binding ligands with antiparallel TG- and AG-containing triplexes. We find that although a 17mer TG-containing oligonucleotide on its own fails to produce a footprint at concentrations as high as 30 microM, this interaction can be stabilised by several ligands. Within a series of disubstituted amidoanthraquinones we...