Immunoglobulin- or multiple myeloma-associated amyloidosis has been distinguished by the tissue deposition of Congophilic, fibrillar protein consisting of light chains or light-chain fragments (AL amyloidosis). We now report the isolation and characterization of another form of immunoglobulin-associated amyloid obtained from a patient who had extensive systemic amyloidosis and in whom the amylo...

Feeding beta-adrenergic agonists promotes muscle growth. Early histological techniques failed to show precisely how feeding ractopamine-HCl (Paylean) alters muscle growth in pigs. To understand these effects, an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to determine the abundance of each adult skeletal muscle myosin heavy chain isoform, one means of assigning muscle fiber type...

With all of the certainty of death and taxes, questions regarding the mechanisms of immunological tolerance remain fixtures across the landscape of immunology. From Paul Ehlirch’s “horror autotoxicus” (reviewed in ref. 1) to the current synthesis of tolerance by apoptosis, anergy, and receptor editing (2), the mechanisms of immunological tolerance remain, despite substantial research effort, en...

In this paper the flatness [M. Fliess, J. Lévine, P. Martin, and P. Rouchon, Internat. J. Control, 61 (1995), pp. 1327–1361, M. Fliess, J. Lévine, P. Martin, and P. Rouchon, IEEE Trans. Automat. Control, 44 (1999), pp. 922–937] of heavy chain systems, i.e., trolleys carrying a fixed length heavy chain that may carry a load, is addressed in the partial derivatives equations framework. We paramet...

Background & Aims: Antibodies, well-known as immunoglobulins (Igs), are produced by B lymphocytes and specifically defend against pathogens. Igs are glycoproteins and have high diagnostic value in several diseases including infections (1). Igs are composed of light and heavy chains (2, 3). Each chain is comprised of about 110-120 amino acid residues which create immunoglobulin folds named domai...

Calpactins are a family of related Ca++-regulated cytoskeletal proteins. To analyze the expression and cytoskeletal association of calpactins we raised monoclonal antibodies with specificity for the heavy or light chains of calpactin I or to calpactin II. Comparison of the tissue distribution of calpactin I heavy and light chains by Western blots revealed that these subunits are coordinately ex...

Antigen-independent B-cell development occurs in several stages that depend on the expression of Ig heavy and light chain. We identified a line of mice that lacked mature B cells in the spleen. This mouse line carried approximately 11 copies of a transgene of the murine heavy chain constant region locus, and B-lineage cells expressed excessive amounts of the intracellular μ heavy chain. B-cell ...

Changes in the expression of heavy chains of myosin during development determine the functional characteristics of striated muscles. The distribution of heavy-chain isoforms of smooth-muscle myosin was determined in the airways of adult and infant humans to see whether it might underlie the hyperreactivity of human airways. The protein bands corresponding to myosin were separated using SDS/poly...

Antibody heavy chains contain a variable and a constant region. The constant region of the antibody heavy chain is encoded by multiple groups of exons which define the isotype and therefore many functional characteristics of the antibody. We performed both single B cell RNAseq and long read single molecule sequencing of antibody heavy chain transcripts and were able to identify novel exons for ...

The murine pre-B cell-specific genes VpreB and lambda 5, as well as the murine gene for mu heavy chain, were introduced into Ltk- fibroblast cells which normally do not express these genes. Stable transfectants carrying these genes produced the corresponding proteins of 15.5, 21.5, and 75 kD. They secreted the three proteins as a triple complex that could be immunoprecipitated by mu heavy chain...