BACKGROUND Lewis Y (Le(y)) is a blood group-related carbohydrate that is expressed at high surface densities on the majority of epithelial carcinomas and is a promising target for antibody-based immunotherapy. A humanized Le(y)-specific antibody (hu3S193) has shown encouraging safety, pharmacokinetic and tumor-targeting properties in recently completed Phase I clinical trials. METHODOLOGY/PRI...

Voltage-gated Ca(2+) channels (VGCC) play a key role in many physiological functions by their high selectivity for Ca(2+) over other divalent and monovalent cations in physiological situations. Divalent/monovalent selection is shared by all VGCC and is satisfactorily explained by the existence, within the pore, of a set of four conserved glutamate/aspartate residues (EEEE locus) coordinating Ca...

Eight mouse monoclonal antibodies specific for hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) were examined for their effects on the antigen-induced proliferative response and lymphokine production of human HBsAg-specific T-cell clones in vitro. While all specifically enhanced the T-cell proliferative response, antibodies of the IgG class were generally more effective than those of the IgM class. Both the...

Antibodies with epitopes near the heavy meromyosin/light meromyosin junction distinguish the folded from the extended conformational states of smooth muscle myosin. Antibody 10S.1 has 100-fold higher avidity for folded than for extended myosin, while antibody S2.2 binds preferentially to the extended state. The properties of these antibodies provide direct evidence that the conformation of the ...

background: mycobacterium tuberculosis is a major cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. infection with this bacterium is known to induce the development of autoantibodies of which a few are also known to be diagnostic markers for some other diseases. antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (anca's) are among those autoantibodies used in clinical setting for diagnosing systemic vasculit...

Abstract Divalent lanthanide organometallics are well‐known highly reducing compounds usually used for single electron transfer reactivity and small molecule activation. Thus, their very reactive nature prevented many years the study of physical properties, such as magnetic studies on a reliable basis. Herein, access to rare organometallic sandwich Tm II with cyclooctatetraenyl (Cot) ligand imp...

The colicin A lysis protein, Cal, is synthesized at the same time as colicin A by Escherichiu coli harbouring plasmid pColA after induction by mitomycin C. Its function in the induced bacteria involves the release of colicin A, quasi-lysis, the death of the producing cells and the activation of the outer membrane phospholipase A. We have found that these various functions are affected different...

Despite decades of research on the effects of zinc in infectious diarrhea, there is surprisingly little consensus on how zinc works (or even if it works), on whether zinc’s effects are pathogen-specific, and what patient populations are most likely to benefit from zinc supplementation. Some recent articles focus on the growthpromoting effects of zinc on the pathogen itself, leading the reader t...

Although the hammerhead reaction proceeds most efficiently in divalent cations, cleavage in 4 M LiCl is only approximately 10-fold slower than under standard conditions of 10 mM MgCl2 (Murray et al., Chem Biol, 1998, 5:587-595; Curtis & Bartel, RNA, 2001, this issue, pp. 546-552). To determine if the catalytic mechanism with high concentrations of monovalent cations is similar to that with diva...