We examined the reactivities of Clostridium butyricum neurotoxin to nine monoclonal antibodies against Clostridium botulinum type E neurotoxin which recognize the light chain or the amino-terminal half (H-1 fragment) or the carboxyl-terminal half (H-2 fragment) of the heavy chain of botulinum neurotoxin. Butyricum neurotoxin and its derived chains did not react to two of four monoclonal antibod...

Bivalent and bispecific antibodies and their fragments have immense potential for practical application. Here we describe the design of small antibody fragments with two antigen-binding sites. The fragments comprise a heavy-chain variable domain (VH) connected to a light-chain variable domain (VL) on the same polypeptide chain (VH-VL). By using a linker that is too short to allow pairing betwee...

Tension generated by growth cones regulates both the rate and the direction of neurite growth. The most likely effectors of tension generation are actin and myosins. We are investigating the role of conventional myosin in growth cone advance. In this paper we report the localization of the two most prominent isoforms of brain myosin II in growth cones, neurites and cell bodies of rat superior c...

Delayed-type hypersensitivity (DTH) to p-azobenzenearsonate (ABA) can be induced in A/J mice with intravenous injection of minute amounts of anti-cross-reactive idiotypic (CRI) antibodies, providing that the animals have been pretreated 2 d earlier with low doses of cyclophosphamide (50 mg/kg). However intravenous injection of the F(ab')2 fragments of the anti-CRI antibodies or subcutaneous adm...

Antibodies of human IgA isotype are critical components of the mucosal immune system, but little is known about their immunotherapeutic potential. Compared with IgG antibodies, IgA molecules carry a C-terminal tail piece extension of 18 amino acids with a free cysteine at position 471. This cysteine is required for the formation of dimeric IgA antibodies, but may impair molecular characteristic...

Detailed analysis of various heparan sulfate (HS) species is seriously hampered by a lack of appropriate tools, such as antibodies. We adopted phage display technology to generate anti-HS antibodies. A "single pot" semisynthetic human antibody phage display library was subjected to four rounds of selection on HS from bovine kidney using panning methodology. Three different phage clones expressi...

To analyze in vivo the induction of B cell tolerance against a T cell surface antigen, we generated transgenic mice expressing an anti-CD8.2 mu heavy chain gene. We show that self-specific B cells are efficiently tolerized if they express the membrane-bound form of the transgenic mu chain on their surface but that they can escape tolerization if they express only the secreted form. In the latte...

background the rate of mother-to-infant hepatitis c virus (hcv) transmission is relatively low, however, this mode of infection is the most important route for childhood hcv involvement. the chances of transmission are increased by the level of maternal hcv viraemia and maternal human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) co infection. objectives the objective of the present study was to determine the p...

Objective Novel clinical and laboratory findings in anti-neurofilament heavy chain encephalitis Background Antibodies to mature components of neuronal intermediate filament (NIF) have been implicated several neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral more recently, various autoimmune encephalitides. The include a-internexin, light chain. In the largest case series...

The structure of the antigen-binding fragment from the monoclonal antibody S64-4 in complex with a pentasaccharide bisphosphate fragment from chlamydial lipopolysaccharide has been determined by x-ray diffraction to 2.6 Å resolution. Like the well-characterized antibody S25-2, S64-4 displays a pocket formed by the residues of germline sequence corresponding to the heavy and light chain V gene s...