Bøger i Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology serien

Genetic / DNA immunization represents a novel approach to vaccine and immune therapeutic development.

The nine chapters presented in this book provide contemporary reviews of research on defective RNAs, satellite RNA viruses, and dependent RNA viruses that require the presence of a helper virus in order to establish productive infections.

Although respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has been a high priority for vaccine development for over 50 years now, still no vaccine is available and none has yet demonstrated sufficient promise to move to licensure.

Pore-forming toxins are virulence factors produced by a great variety of pathogenic bacteria ranging from the Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus to the Gram-negative Helicobacter pylory.

The next major advance was the discovery that tetanus neurotoxin 1 can be converted by formaldehyde treatment to a nonpathogenic but still fully immunogenic form, and that this can be used successfully as a vaccine to prevent tetanus (RAMON and DESCOMBEY 1925).

With contributions from an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts, this illustrated volume reviews the diverse mechanisms-genetic, metabolic, and molecular-that give M. tuberculosis its antibiotic-resistant virulence and allow it to evade immune systems.

The chapters cover the development of the thymic epithelial microenvironment, address the formation of a diverse and self-tolerant repertoire of T cell receptors as the basis for cellular immunity, discuss the mechanisms by which progenitor cells colonize the thymus and detail the molecular basis for T lineage decisions.

Legionnaires' disease, a potentially fatal type of pneumonia primarily affecting elderly and immuno-compromised persons, is caused by the ubiquitous environmental bacterium Legionella pneumophila.

Moreover, several human diseases are caused by retroviruses, including AIDS, adult T-cell leukemia and the neurological disease HAM/TSP. The topic of this volume is a relatively unknown animal retrovirus, jaagsiekte sheep retrovirus, the causative agent of transmissible lung cancer in sheep -ovine pulmonary adenocarcinoma.

The immune system must maintain a balance between the deletion of harmful self-reactive B cells and the generation of a diverse rep ertoire of B cells that has the ability to recognize an almost un limited array of foreign antigens.

The development of live vaccines against the disease is remarkable as it has led to the first example of a commercially available vaccine against cancer as well as against diseases caused by herpesviruses. This volume gives an overview on many aspects of MDV research and summarizes recent advances in the field.

The fact that none of the known DNA polymerases is able to initiate DNA chains but only to elongate from a free 3' -OH group raises the problem of how replication is initiated, both at the replication origin and on Okazaki frag ments.

Bluetongue viruses (BTV) cause diseases that have serious economic consequences in ruminants (sheep, cattle) in many parts of the world.

Borna disease was first described over 200 years ago, in what is now Southeastern Germany, as a fatal neurologic affliction of horses and was considered a curiosity for many decades.

Intracellular pathogens are responsible for a number of important diseases worldwide, including tuberculosis, plague and bacillary dysentery. In recent years the entry steps have been described at the molecular and genetic level, and the important signal transduction events are being elucidated.

In fact, more than 25% of the population suffer from IgE-mediated allergies which therefore represent a major health burden of our society, particularly because untreated allergy often progresses to severe disabling forms of disease, such as asthma and sometimes kills sensitized people through anaphylaxis.

Drugs targeting fundamental cellular processes such DNA-replication and microtubule function, often referred to as "chemotherapy" and still the backbone of most cancer treatment regimens, are increasingly being complemented by or replaced with kinase inhibitors. This book summarizes the state of kinase inhibitor therapy for cancer.

Antibodies are central to vaccines and it is becoming increasingly apparent that understanding how antibodies combat viruses could be crucial in a new era of vaccine development. This book describes the state of the art in explaining the anti-viral activity of antibodies at the molecular level, with chapters from many of the leaders in the field.

It opens with chapters that provide the reader with current perspectives on biofilm development, physiology, environmental, and regulatory effects, the role of quorum sensing, and resistance/phenotypic persistence to antimicrobial agents during biofilm growth.

The proteins that catalyze many steps of the process have now been identified by biochemical and genetic recon stitution and by analysis of genetic mutants defective in V(D)J recombination. In addition to exciting progress in V(D)J recombination and class switch recombination, one chapter describes recent pro gress in somatic hypermutation.

This volume highlights the most interesting biomedical and clinical applications of high-dimensional flow and mass cytometry. It reviews current practical approaches used to perform high-dimensional experiments and addresses key bioinformatic techniques for the analysis of data sets involving dozens of parameters in millions of single cells.

The resources of the less developed nations are inadequate for solving the problem, and in the de veloped countries a lack of interest in tropical diseases has meant low priority for research.

The guest editor, Professor Lars Olding, has a long and distinguished history of contributions in this field, having been one of the main propo nents of the argument that lymphocytes from the fetus play an active role in this process by suppressing lymphocytes from the mother from proliferating and thereby acting as killer cells.