Sachiko Hirose

Morphological observations on the vasculitis in the mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome

Twenty-seven skin biopsies were obtained from the exanthemata of patients in the acute stage of the mucocutaneous lymph node syndrome (MCLS). The three vascular systems of different caliber size—the intrapapillary capillary loops (ICL), the superficial arteriolar or venular plexus (SAP, SVP) and the small subcutaneous vessels—were examined to investigate the characteristics of the vasculitis in MCLS and differentiate it from infantile polyarteritis nodosa (IPN). Significant papillary edema and dilatation of ICL, SAP and SVP were observed on the 4th day after the onset of the illness, and then gradually decreased. In the subcutaneous regions, vasculitis began which endothelial necrosis, and subendothelial edema and degenerative changes in the muscle cells followed. These changes in the small subcutaneous vessels were observed for a longer period than in the ICL, SAP and SVP. Moderate mononuclear cell infiltrations were observed. Both arteries and veins were affected.

Bullous Pemphigoid Associated with Radiotherapy for Esophageal Carcinoma

The authors present a case of bullous pemphigoid occurring after radiotherapy for esophageal cancer which was histologically squamous cell carcinoma revealed by the postmortem examination. To our knowledge, such a coexistence may be the first case.

PROLIFERATION OF CULTURED RABBIT RENAL GLOMERULAR CELLS STIMULATED BY PLATELET FACTOR

Platelet contents stimulated the proliferation of cultured rabbit renal glomerular (probably mesangial) cells. Growth stimulatory effect of platelet factor was heat‐stable at 56°C for 30 min. These results suggest that platelets play an important role in glomerular lesions in glomerulonephritis.

Exhaustive Characterization of TCRâÂÂpMHC Binding Energy Estimated by the String Model and Miyazawa-Jernigan Matrix

Accurate calculations of protein–protein binding free energies based on rigorous models, which consider the binding complex structure in atomic detail, are computationally expensive and impracticable to apply to T cell repertoire formation that occurs in the thymus because this process involves the interactions among numerous combinations of T cell receptors (TCRs) and presented peptides. By comparison, an evaluation of binding free-energy using a combination of the string model and Miyazawa-Jernigan matrix is very efficient and was therefore applied to estimate interaction energies between T cell receptor–peptide–MHC (TCR–pMHC) complexes, which appeared to successfully explain the effects of binding capacity of MHC on repertoire–formation and the reason for the presence of elite-controllers of some viral infections. However, this evaluation method is overly simplified and requires more detailed considerations when applied to evaluating TCR-pMHC interactions. In this study, we examined this method exhaustively and revealed the limitations of the method. Following features necessitate cautious attitude when interpreting the calculation results: first, the apparent increase in the number of hot spots in accordance with an increase of educational epitope pool size does not mean an increased TCR specificity of surviving clones; second, strong binders to any TCR converge to some limited sequences that are determined by the physical nature of the Miyazawa-Jernigan matrix.