Pathogenicity of a bovine viral diarrhoea virus strain in pregnant sows: Short communication

The biological properties of bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV) strain Oregon C24V were studied after intranasal and subcutaneous infection of pregnant sows. This virus strain is widely used in Hungary for immunising cattle against bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD). Based upon the results of the clinical, gross pathological, histopathological and virological examinations it can be established that the given strain caused asymptomatic infection and serological conversion in sows that were in the second third of gestation. The virus caused clinically apparent disease in some of the piglets born at term, which indicates that it had crossed the placenta. More than half (57%) of the live-born piglets died within 60 days of birth. The sows and their progeny did not shed the virus. BVDV infection has great differential diagnostic importance in pigs, as classical swine fever (CSF) virus strains of reduced virulence cause similar clinical symptoms and gross and histopathological changes

Human dirofilaria repens infection in Hungary: A case in the spermatic cord and a review of the literature

Orchiectomy was performed in a 37-year-old Hungarian man exhibiting a swelling in his right testicle. Histology revealed a nodule attached to the spermatic cord, consisting of a granulomatous tissue around sections of a nematode. The worm was identified asDirofilaria repens, an uncommon parasite in Hungary. As the patient had been abroad only in Italy where cases of dirofilariosis in dogs and humans are relatively frequent, it is assumed that the infection might have been acquired in that country 5 years earlier. This is the fifth case, published so far in the world, of such a localization in a human. The human cases of dirofilariosis reported in Hungary are reviewed

GLADE+: An Extended Galaxy Catalogue for Multimessenger Searches with Advanced Gravitational-wave Detectors

We present GLADE+, an extended version of the GLADE galaxy catalogue introduced in our previous paper for multimessenger searches with advanced gravitational-wave detectors. GLADE+ combines data from six separate but not independent astronomical catalogues: the GWGC, 2MPZ, 2MASS XSC, HyperLEDA, and WISExSCOSPZ galaxy catalogues, and the SDSS-DR16Q quasar catalogue. To allow corrections of CMB-frame redshifts for peculiar motions, we calculated peculiar velocities along with their standard deviations of all galaxies having $B$-band magnitude data within redshift $z=0.05$ using the "Bayesian Origin Reconstruction from Galaxies" formalism. GLADE+ is complete up to luminosity distance $d_L=47^{+4}_{-2}$ Mpc in terms of the total expected $B$-band luminosity of galaxies, and contains all of the brightest galaxies giving 90\% of the total $B$-band and $K$-band luminosity up to $d_L\simeq 130$ Mpc. We include estimations of stellar masses and individual binary neutron star merger rates for galaxies with $W1$ magnitudes. These parameters can help in ranking galaxies in a given gravitational wave localization volume in terms of their likelihood of being hosts, thereby possibly reducing the number of pointings and total integration time needed to find the electromagnetic counterpart.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Fémek szerepe a fehérjeszerkezetben és - működésben = The role of metals in protein structure and function

Fehérjekrisztallográfia, mágneses magrezonancia-spektroszkópia és molekulamodellezés segítségével vizsgáltuk az összefüggéseket néhány metalloprotein, valamint egy új típusú, rendezetlen fehérje szerkezete és működése között. Hatékony módszert fejlesztettünk ki a reakcióút kvantummechanikai számítására enzimekben. Tisztáztuk a DNS javításában fontos szerepet játszó dUTPáz által katalizált reakció legtöbb részletét. Meggyőző bizonyítékokat szolgáltattunk arra, hogy az enzimatikus foszfáthidrolízis során a dUTPázban nagy energiájú, trigonális bipiramisos elrendeződésű intermedier keletkezik. Kimutattuk, hogy a KAR-2 nevű molekula más, biszindol típusú ligandumoktól eltérő módon kötődik a kalmodulinhoz, ez magyarázza különleges fiziológiai hatását. Elvégeztük a hemoglobin hem-csoportjainak normál koordináták szerinti analízisét, amiből következtetéseket vontunk le a szerkezetre vonatkozóan. A deformációk azt mutatják, hogy a hem csoport szerkezete érzékeny a molekula távoli részében kötődő effektor jelenlétére, ami az allosztérikus szabályozás hatásmechanizmusának a tercier szerkezettel való kapcsolatát támasztja alá. A közelmúltban egy új agy-specifikus fehérjét izoláltunk, melynek átlagos rendezetlensége 46-47%, tehát szerkezet nélkülinek tekinthető. Részletes vizsgálatokat végeztünk e fehérje, illetve különböző fehérjékkel képezett komplexe szerkezetére vonatkozóan. | We investigated the relationship between the structure and activity of some metalloproteins and a new unfolded protein. We developed an efficient method for the quantum mechanical calculation of the reaction path in enzymes. Most details of the reaction catalysed by dUTPase, playing an important role in DNA repair, have been clarified. We provided convincing evidence that during enzymatic phosphate hydrolysis a high-energy, trigonal bipyramidal intermediate is formed. We have shown that the molecule KAR-2, in contrast to other bisindole-type ligands, has a different binding mode to calmodulin, which explains its special physiological effect. We performed the normal co-ordinate analysis of the hem groups of haemoglobin and derived conclusions on their structure. The deformations indicate that the structure of the hem group is sensitive to the presence of an effector bound in a distant region of the molecule. This finding supports the relation between the allosteric mechanism of action and the tertiary structure. Recently we isolated a new brain-specific protein, which is 46 to 47 per cent disordered, i.e. it can be considered as unfolded. We made detailed studies on the structure of this protein and its complex with others

A tuberkulózis előfordulása egy XVIII. századi váci családban

Two individuals of the Nigrovits family from the Vác Mummy Collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum were the subjects of multidisciplinary, anthropological, paleopathological, radiological, paleomicrobiological and paleoproteomic studies. The father, József Nigrovits (No 29), died at the age of 55 on the 11th of November 1793; his son, Antal Nigrovits (No 54), died on the 16th of July 1803, at the age of 22. They lived in the 18th century in a small town of northern Hungary. The macroscopic examination of body No 54 showed a severely deformed neck and back region; body No 29 had no characteristic marks of any illnesses. The CT scan data of the bodies and their 3D reconstructions showed no skeletal evidence of tuberculosis, despite the positive results of their paleomicrobiological studies. The deformity of body No 54 turned to be a developmental abnormality of unknown origin, but no Pott’s gibbus was present

Ancient genomes reveal a high diversity of Mycobacterium leprae in medieval Europe.

Studying ancient DNA allows us to retrace the evolutionary history of human pathogens, such as Mycobacterium leprae, the main causative agent of leprosy. Leprosy is one of the oldest recorded and most stigmatizing diseases in human history. The disease was prevalent in Europe until the 16th century and is still endemic in many countries with over 200,000 new cases reported annually. Previous worldwide studies on modern and European medieval M. leprae genomes revealed that they cluster into several distinct branches of which two were present in medieval Northwestern Europe. In this study, we analyzed 10 new medieval M. leprae genomes including the so far oldest M. leprae genome from one of the earliest known cases of leprosy in the United Kingdom-a skeleton from the Great Chesterford cemetery with a calibrated age of 415-545 C.E. This dataset provides a genetic time transect of M. leprae diversity in Europe over the past 1500 years. We find M. leprae strains from four distinct branches to be present in the Early Medieval Period, and strains from three different branches were detected within a single cemetery from the High Medieval Period. Altogether these findings suggest a higher genetic diversity of M. leprae strains in medieval Europe at various time points than previously assumed. The resulting more complex picture of the past phylogeography of leprosy in Europe impacts current phylogeographical models of M. leprae dissemination. It suggests alternative models for the past spread of leprosy such as a wide spread prevalence of strains from different branches in Eurasia already in Antiquity or maybe even an origin in Western Eurasia. Furthermore, these results highlight how studying ancient M. leprae strains improves understanding the history of leprosy worldwide

Revising mtDNA haplotypes of the ancient Hungarian conquerors with next generation sequencing

As part of the effort to create a high resolution representative sequence database of the medieval Hungarian conquerors we have resequenced the entire mtDNA genome of 24 published ancient samples with Next Generation Sequencing, whose haplotypes had been previously determined with traditional PCR based methods. We show that PCR based methods are prone to erroneous haplotype or haplogroup determination due to ambiguous sequence reads, and many of the resequenced samples had been classified inaccurately. The SNaPshot method applied with published ancient DNA authenticity criteria is the most straightforward and cheapest PCR based approach for testing a large number of coding region SNP-s, which greatly facilitates correct haplogroup determination