Interleukin 2-regulated in vitro antibody production following a single spinal manipulative treatment in normal subjects

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Our recent investigations have demonstrated that cell cultures from subjects, who received a single spinal manipulative treatment in the upper thoracic spine, show increased capacity for the production of the key immunoregulatory cytokine, interleukin-2. However, it has not been determined if such changes influence the response of the immune effector cells. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to determine whether, in the same subjects, spinal manipulation-related augmentation of the <it>in vitro </it>interleukin-2 synthesis is associated with the modulation of interleukin 2-dependent and/or interleukin-2-induced humoral immune response (antibody synthesis).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A total of seventy-four age and sex-matched healthy asymptomatic subjects were studied. The subjects were assigned randomly to: venipuncture control (n = 22), spinal manipulative treatment without cavitation (n = 25) or spinal manipulative treatment associated with cavitation (n = 27) groups. Heparinized blood samples were obtained from the subjects before (baseline) and then at 20 minutes and 2 hours post-treatment. Immunoglobulin (antibody) synthesis was induced in cultures of peripheral blood mononuclear cells by stimulation with conventional pokeweed mitogen or by application of human recombinant interleukin-2. Determinations of the levels of immunoglobulin G and immunoglobulin M production in culture supernatants were performed by specific immunoassays.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The baseline levels of immunoglobulin synthesis induced by pokeweed mitogen or human recombinant interleukin-2 stimulation were comparable in all groups. No significant changes in the production of pokeweed mitogen-induced immunoglobulins were observed during the post-treatment period in any of the study groups. In contrast, the production of interleukin-2 -induced immunoglobulin G and immunoglobulin M was significantly increased in cultures from subjects treated with spinal manipulation. At 20 min post-manipulation, immunoglobulin G synthesis was significantly elevated in subjects who received manipulation with cavitation, relative to that in cultures from subjects who received manipulation without cavitation and venipuncture alone. At 2 hr post-treatment, immunoglobulin M synthesis was significantly elevated in subjects who received manipulation with cavitation relative to the venipuncture group. There were no quantitative alterations within the population of peripheral blood B or T lymphocytes in the studied cultures.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Spinal manipulative treatment does not increase interleukin-2 -dependent polyclonal immunoglobulin synthesis by mitogen-activated B cells. However, antibody synthesis induced by interleukin-2 alone can be, at least temporarily, augmented following spinal manipulation. Thus, under certain physiological conditions spinal manipulative treatment might influence interleukin-2 -regulated biological responses.</p

Numerical modeling of the impact of pump wavelength on Yb-doped fiber amplifier performance

Ytterbium-doped optical amplifiers have become common tools for industrial applications due to their high efficiency, relatively low cost and potentially very high output power level. The efficiency of an ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier depends mainly on the absorption of pump radiation, and, therefore, optimum pump wavelengths have been proposed such as 915 nm. However, the semiconductor pump diodes batch supplied by manufacturers may exhibit a spread in the output wavelength. This paper theoretically investigates the performance of Yb-doped amplifiers for different pump wavelengths and defines the pump power penalty when the pump source does not emit at the optimum wavelength. The penalty has been defined as normalized excess pump power required to achieve the desired gain

Why Are There So Few Rickettsia conorii conorii-Infected Rhipicephalus sanguineus Ticks in the Wild?

The bacterium Rickettsia conorii conorii is the etiological agent of Mediterranean spotted fever (MSF), which is a life-threatening infectious disease that is transmitted by Rhipicephalus sanguineus, the brown dog tick. Rh. sanguineus-R. conorii conorii relationships in the wild are still poorly understood one century after the discovery of the disease. In this study, we collected naturally infected ticks from the houses of people afflicted by MSF in Algeria. Colonies of both infected and non-infected ticks were maintained in our laboratory, and we studied the effect of temperature variations on the infected and non-infected ticks. We did not observe any major differences between the biological life cycle of the infected and non-infected ticks held at 25°C. However, a comparatively higher mortality relative to the control group was noticed when R. conorii conorii-infected engorged nymphs and adults were exposed to a low temperature (4°C) or high temperature (37°C) for one month and transferred to 25°C. R. conorii conorii-infected Rh. sanguineus may maintain and serve as reservoirs for the Rickettsia if they are not exposed to cold temperatures. New populations of ticks might become infected with Rickettsiae when feeding on a bacteremic animal reservoir

Burn wounds infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa triggers weight loss in rats

BACKGROUND: Despite dramatic improvements in the management of burns, infection still remains a serious risk for the burn patient. The aim of this study was to shed light on the impact of acute burn injury with or without infection on cytokine profiles. METHODS: Sprague-Dawley rats (n = 21) were randomized into three groups: 1) burn only 2) burn and infection or 3) sham burn. Weight was monitored and blood was collected for cytokine ELISA, LPS quantification, and peripheral blood analysis. Animals were sacrificed either after 6 or 12 days. RESULTS: Infected animals showed substantial weight loss until day 6 post-burn as compared to burn alone. Endotoxin and TNF-α levels were elevated early in the infected burn group within 48 hours post-burn. In contrast, significant up-regulation of the anti-inflammatory cytokine IL-10 occurred later in the clinical course and was associated with the recovery from weight loss. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that in the presence of infection, you get a SIRS response possibly due to transient endotoxemia that is only seen in the infection group. In contrast, both burn and infection get a late IL-10 (CARS) response, which is then associated with a return to normal weight in the infection group

RNA-Seq reveals large quantitative differences between the transcriptomes of outbreak and non-outbreak locusts

Outbreaks of locust populations repeatedly devastate economies and ecosystems in large parts of the world. The consequent behavioural shift from solitarious to gregarious and the concomitant changes in the locusts’ biology are of relevant scientific interest. Yet, research on the main locust species has not benefitted from recent advances in genomics. In this first RNA-Seq study on Schistocerca gregaria, we report two transcriptomes, including many novel genes, as well as differential gene expression results. In line with the large biological differences between solitarious and gregarious locusts, almost half of the transcripts are differentially expressed between their central nervous systems. Most of these transcripts are over-expressed in the gregarious locusts, suggesting positive correlations between the levels of activity at the population, individual, tissue and gene expression levels. We group these differentially expressed transcripts by gene function and highlight those that are most likely to be associated with locusts’ phase change either in a species-specific or general manner. Finally, we discuss our findings in the context of population-level and physiological events leading to gregariousness.M. Bakkali wishes to thank the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología for the for the Ramón y Cajal fellowship and for the BFU2010-16438 grant that supported both this research and the FPI studentship to Rubén Martín Blázquez. We thank Mrs. Pernille Lavgesen for revision of the English language writing of this manuscript. We also thank the editor for the valuable comments on the manuscript

A united statement of the global chiropractic research community against the pseudoscientific claim that chiropractic care boosts immunity.

BACKGROUND: In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the International Chiropractors Association (ICA) posted reports claiming that chiropractic care can impact the immune system. These claims clash with recommendations from the World Health Organization and World Federation of Chiropractic. We discuss the scientific validity of the claims made in these ICA reports. MAIN BODY: We reviewed the two reports posted by the ICA on their website on March 20 and March 28, 2020. We explored the method used to develop the claim that chiropractic adjustments impact the immune system and discuss the scientific merit of that claim. We provide a response to the ICA reports and explain why this claim lacks scientific credibility and is dangerous to the public. More than 150 researchers from 11 countries reviewed and endorsed our response. CONCLUSION: In their reports, the ICA provided no valid clinical scientific evidence that chiropractic care can impact the immune system. We call on regulatory authorities and professional leaders to take robust political and regulatory action against those claiming that chiropractic adjustments have a clinical impact on the immune system

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe