Here, we demonstrate that human herpesvirus 6B (HHV-6B) infection upregulates the tumour suppressor p53 and induces phosphorylation of p53 at Ser392. Interestingly, phosphorylation at the equivalent site has previously been shown to correlate with p53 tumour suppression in murine models. Although the signalling pathways leading to Ser392 phosphorylation are poorly understood, they seem to inclu...

Prevalence of serotype 6B penicillin (PEN)-nonsusceptible Streptococcus pneumoniae significantly increased from 15.8% (1993-1997) to 67.3% (1998-2002) (p<0.001) in Argentina. Serogroup 6 ranks fourth among different capsular types within invasive isolates from Argentinean patients <6 years of age. To evaluate whether the increase in PEN resistance in serotype 6B pneumococci was due to the disse...

BACKGROUND We investigated the immune response to serogroup 6 with the opsonophagocytic killing assay (OPKA) in children aged 12-23 months of age after immunization with the 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV7) containing serotype 6B. METHODS Blood samples were obtained from 59 children who had blood sampling for medical examination. Immunization status against PCV7 was confirmed by...

Streptococcus pneumoniae clinical isolates were recently described that produced capsular polysaccharide with properties of both serotypes 6A and 6B. Their hybrid serological property correlated with mutations affecting the glycosyltransferase WciP, which links rhamnose to ribitol by an α(1-3) linkage for serotypes 6A and 6C and an α(1-4) linkage for serotypes 6B and 6D. The isolates had mutati...

Many pneumococcal capsular polysaccharides (PSs) are similar in structure, and a pneumococcal antibody often binds to all of the PSs with a similar structure. Yet, these cross-reactive antibodies may bind to the structurally related pneumococcal capsular PSs with an avidity too low to be effective. If memory B cells producing such weakly cross-reactive antibodies are elicited with pneumococcal ...

Crown gall tumors are formed mainly by actions of a group of genes in the T-DNA that is transferred from Agrobacterium tumefaciens and integrated into the nuclear DNA of host plants. These genes encode enzymes for biosynthesis of auxin and cytokinin in plant cells. Gene 6b in the T-DNA affects tumor morphology and this gene alone is able to induce small tumors on certain plant species. In addit...

To better understand the pathogenesis of human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), it is important to elucidate the functional aspects of immediate-early (IE) genes at the initial phase of the infection. To study the functional role of the HHV-6B IE gene encoding U95, we generated a U95-Myc fusion protein and screened a pretransformed bone marrow cDNA library for U95-interacting proteins, using yeast-two hy...

Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) was applied to all unique serotype 6C and 6D isolates and a random selection of serotype 6B and 6A isolates from nasopharyngeal swabs from Fijian children enrolled in a recent vaccine trial. The results suggest that Fijian serotype 6D has arisen independently from both serotypes 6A/C and 6B.

Treatment of 9-chloro-9-borafluorene with N,O-bis(trimethylsilyl)hydroxylamine results in 10-trimethylsilyloxy-9-aza-10-boraphenanthrene 6b. NMR spectroscopy shows that the expected antiaromatic 9-(trimethylsilyloxyamino)-9-borafluorene 5b rearranges to the formally aromatic phenanthrene 6b at room temperature.