The present study aimed to examine somatic complaints in children with anxiety disorders compared to non-anxious control children and whether somatic complaints predict poorer academic performance. The sample consisted of 108 children and adolescents (aged 8-14 years) assessed by a structured diagnostic interview: 69 with a principal (i.e., most severe and/or interfering) anxiety disorder diagn...

The immunoglobulin (Ig) repertoire achieves functional diversification through several somatic alterations of the Ig locus. One of these processes, somatic hypermutation (SHM), deposits point mutations into the variable region of the Ig gene to generate higher-affinity variants. Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) converts cytidine to uridine to initiate the hypermutation process. Error...

OBJECTIVE Determine if somatic tinnitus patients with hyperacusis have different characteristics from those without hyperacusis. PATIENTS AND METHODS 172 somatic tinnitus patients with (n = 82) and without (n = 90) hyperacusis referred to the Tinnitus Unit of Sapienza University of Rome between June 2012 and June 2016 were compared for demographic characteristics, tinnitus features, self-admi...

OBJECTIVE To examine the influence of parental solicitousness on self-reported somatic complaints in school-age children. DESIGN AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Participants were 564 children (mean age 10 years) and their parents. Children completed self-report measures of somatic complaints, parental solicitousness, depressiveness, fear, and sense of coherence. Somatic complaints were assessed aga...

Somatic hypermutation is critical for the generation of high-affinity antibodies and effective immune responses, but its molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Recent studies have identified DNA strand lesions associated with the hypermutation process and suggested the involvement of specific repair molecules and pathways. Particularly exciting has been the discovery of a putative RNA e...

Targeting of AID to antibody variable (V) regions results in somatic hypermutation, whereas its recruitment to switch (S) regions leads to class-switch recombination. Yeap et al. find that the mechanism by which variable and switch regions recruit AID essentially is the same but that the two regions differ in the density of double-stranded DNA breaks that are generated. These lead to either poi...

We quantify the VDJ recombination and somatic hypermutation processes in human B cells using probabilistic inference methods on high-throughput DNA sequence repertoires of human B-cell receptor heavy chains. Our analysis captures the statistical properties of the naive repertoire, first after its initial generation via VDJ recombination and then after selection for functionality. We also infer ...

Somatic hypermutation of Ig genes is initiated by transcription-coupled cytidine deamination in Ig loci. Error-prone processing of the resultant DNA lesions is thought to cause extensive mutagenesis, but it is presently an enigma how and why error-prone rather than error-free repair pathways are recruited. During DNA replication, recruitment of error-prone translesion polymerases may be mediate...