1,720,994 research outputs found
Peptide-based immunoassays: a challenge for high performance diagnostics & prognostics of autoimmune diseases
No full textAutoimmune diseases are considered now as a plague. In fact some
autoimmune diseases previously considered rare are actually increasing
their frequency because of an earlier diagnosis (e.g. celiac disease).
Possibly also an environmental factor (bacterial and/or viral infection) should contribute to autoimmune diseases. The idea we have been
investigating for years and more recently proposed by others, is that
aberrant post-translational modifi cations, i.e. glycosylation, deimination
etc., create neoantigens triggering autoantibodies. This could explain
why proteins (both recombinant and isolated), components of target
organs or tissues, are failing. Anyway, it is evident that one single
biomarker will never enable to reach successful diagnostic & prognostic
tools. On the contrary, synthetic peptides specifi cally modifi ed (with
sugars, citrulline, lipoyl moieties, etc.) are interesting tools to fi shing
out of patients’ sera these autoantibodies. We have recently reported that
this can be effi ciently done following a “Chemical Reverse Approach”
1.. We successfully applied this strategy in the development of the
fi rst Multiple Sclerosis Antigenic Probe [MSAP]: an N-glucosylated
peptide characterised by a -hairpin structure exposing at the best the
minimal epitope Asn(-Glc) involved in antibody recognition (2). A
wider application of our SAP is obtained by its citrullinatation and/or
galactosylation (3) useful for rheumatoid arthritis or lipoylation for
investigating primary biliary cirrhosis
Feline immunodeficiency virus plasma load reduction by a retroinverso octapeptide reproducing the Trp-rich motif of the transmembrane glycoprotein
No full textThe Trp-rich motif (TrpM) of the transmembrane glycoprotein (TM) of lentiviruses is an attractive domain on which to design new potential cell entry peptide inhibitors. We recently demonstrated that an octapeptide reproducing the TrpM of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), designated C8, broadly inhibited this virus in vitro and that the retroinverso analogue of this peptide (riC8) was almost as inhibitory and exhibited features suggestive of a much increased stability. Here, we demonstrated that riC8 is indeed highly stable, maintaining its concentration unchanged for at least 24 In in cat serum in vitro. Furthermore, once inoculated into cats, riC8 produced no major acute toxic effects and exhibited satisfactory pharmacolkinetic properties. Finally, we report the results of a short-term monotherapy experiment in chronically FIV-infected cats showing that riC8 is well tolerated and also has substantial antiviral activity in vivo. In particular, the mean viral load of riC8-treated animals declined progressively with increasing time of treatment, whereas that of control animals given C8 or solvent alone did not. These results provide the first evidence that clinically useful inhibition of virus replication with a small peptide derived from a functional domain of the TM of a lentivirus can be achieved in vivo
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Peptides as autoimmune diseases antigenic probes - A peptide-based reverse approach to detect biomarkers of autoimmune diseases
No full textAbstract not availabl
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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