Antonio Miranda García

Comparison of a Dipstick Assay for Detection of Brucella-Specific Immunoglobulin M Antibodies with Other Tests for Serodiagnosis of Human Brucellosis

ABSTRACT A dipstick assay for the detection of Brucella-specific immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibodies was evaluated by studying the serological response of 133 cultures and or serologically confirmed patients with brucellosis in its different stages along with those of 34 healthy controls. As regards patients with illness less than 3 months in duration, 93.1% tested positive by the dipstick assay, a percentage similar to that obtained in the standard serum agglutination test (SAT) (92.0%), somewhat lower than that obtained by culture (100%) and higher than that obtained by IgM enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) (80.5%). SAT was the most sensitive test (87.0%) for patients with illness more than 3 months in duration, followed by culture (50%), the dipstick assay (28.3%), and IgM ELISA (7.5%). The results demonstrate that the dipstick assay could well be used in the serodiagnosis of patients with acute brucellosis, as well as to identify patients with a long history of the illness. Under laboratory conditions this test has the advantage of being quick and IgM antibody-specific.

Characterization of muscarinic receptors in human submandibular salivary glands

We studied the binding of the muscarinic antagonist [3H]N-methyl-scopolamine [( 3H]NMS) in order to characterize muscarinic receptors located in human submandibular salivary glands obtained from intrasurgical biopsy. [3H]NMS bound with a Kd value of 1.56 nM to a single class of muscarinic receptors (Bmax 37.3 fmol/mg protein) since pirenzepine exhibited a homogeneous binding profile.

The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer

This paper presents the Old English Concordancer (OEC), a new tool to process an annotated corpus of Old English, which goes beyond the prototypical operations of similar programmes (lists, indexes, concordances, statistical information, queries, etc). Since annotation includes also lemmatisation and tagging, OEC can perform all those tasks not only with words but also with lemmas, and can solve any morphological query successfully, regardless of its complexity, by means of Boolean filters. It allows some simple syntactical research at sentence level as well, as it is sensitive to context and word-order. Moreover, the statistical information that the OEC generates includes absolute and relative values of items, as well as their distribution by words, lemmas, class and/or accidence [inflection], vocabulary profiles, etc. The OEC has been applied to an annotated version of The Old English Apollonius of Tyre, and some of the results that can be obtained are presented, along with others that can be indirectly derived from them.

Study of chromosomal region 5p13.1 in Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and rheumatoid arthritis

Chromosomal region 5p13 includes regulatory elements of the prostaglandin receptor EP4 (PTGER4) gene and is associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) susceptibility. We aimed at corroborating the association of the PTGER4 risk variant in IBD. Given the proinflammatory activity of prostaglandin E(2) in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the reduction in incidence and severity of collagen-induced arthritis observed in mice deficient in the prostaglandin receptor EP4, and a modest signal of association found in an RA genome-wide scan, we proposed to extend the investigation of this locus to RA patients. A total of 709 Crohns disease (CD) patients, 662 ulcerative colitis (UC) patients, and 1369 control subjects were genotyped for rs17234657. This polymorphism was also analyzed in 605 RA patients, and rs6871834 was studied in the RA patient group. Replication of the previous finding in CD was achieved in our independent collections, although with a milder effect (odds ratios = 1.23) than that originally described. No further association of the previously mentioned polymorphisms was detected with either UC or RA patients. We validated this 5p13 signal as a genuine susceptibility factor for CD in Caucasian populations. Our data seem to rule out a major influence of these polymorphisms on UC or RA predisposition.

NPSR1 Gene Is Associated with Reduced Risk of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Objective. Neuropeptide S receptor 1 (NPSR1) is a G protein-coupled receptor involved in immune response and is associated with several inflammatory diseases. We investigated the possible contribution of several polymorphisms in the intronic region of NPSR1 to rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Methods. Genotyping of 7 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) was performed in a total of 1232 patients with RA and 983 healthy controls of Spanish white origin by real-time polymerase chain reaction technology, using the TaqMan 5′-allele discrimination assay. Results. One out of the 7 SNP analyzed (rs740347) was associated with RA [p after Bonferroni correction (pBNF) = 1.2 × 10−3, OR 0.73]. An association was also observed with rheumatoid factor-positive and shared epitope-positive RA (pBNF = 0.011, OR 0.73; pBNF = 0.037, OR 0.75, respectively). Conclusion. Our results show that variations in the NPSR1 intronic region are associated with low risk in patients with RA, supporting other evidence that this locus represents a common genetic factor in inflammatory diseases.

Aspects of punctuation in the Old English "Apollonius of Tyre"

Abstract 1. Introduction The punctuation system of mediaeval manuscripts can be compared to the experience of using a new software application. When confronted with scribal punctuation for the first time, it is as if you had the intimidating commands of the menu bar in front of you, waiting for a mouse click. In the case of punctuation marks, one cannot help but look at them with a bewildered glance and wonder about the kinds of pauses that they signal, or even try to find some sort of coherence within the set of symbols at hand. This has been precisely the general contention until late in the 20th century, before which time scribal punctuation had been neglected in the assumption that it was meaningless and haphazard, scattered at random through the folios of the manuscript (Jenkinson 1926: 154; Denholm-Young 1954: 77; Zeeman 1956: 11-18; Heyworth 1981: 139-140). In this vein, Parkes argued that the apparent chaos of most manuscripts is just a scribal convention whereby “scribes and correctors punctuate where confusion is likely to arise and do not always punctuate where confusion is not likely to arise” (Parkes 1978: 138-139).