DEVELOPMENT AND WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION OF THE ANGLO NUBIAN GOAT

The present study describes the formation of the Anglo Nubian breed in Britain and follows up the original transfer of the founder breeds to Britain in the 19th century. An overview on the worldwide spread of the Anglo Nubian from Britain to the USA and Canada, later to Africa and Asia as well as Latin America is given. Information was compiled through project reports, literature, statistical records where available and accessible and interviews with experts. It is concluded that the Anglo Nubian is an example of a breed developed by combining genetic resources from different parts of the world joining performance and adaptation to tropical conditions. The breed spread to all continents. Apart from being kept as purebreds, it is more often used in crossbreeding programmes in different regions of the world. The value of this genetic resource has been recognized a long time ago, but there seem to be no efforts to counteract the danger of loosing it by excessive use in uncontrolled crossbreeding

A Generic Approach for Miniaturized Unbiased High-Throughput Screens of Bispecific Antibodies and Biparatopic Antibody–Drug Conjugates

The toolbox of modern antibody engineering allows the design of versatile novel functionalities exceeding nature’s repertoire. Many bispecific antibodies comprise heterodimeric Fc portions recently validated through the approval of several bispecific biotherapeutics. While heterodimerization methodologies have been established for low-throughput large-scale production, few approaches exist to overcome the bottleneck of large combinatorial screening efforts that are essential for the identification of the best possible bispecific antibody. This report presents a novel, robust and miniaturized heterodimerization process based on controlled Fab-arm exchange (cFAE), which is applicable to a variety of heterodimeric formats and compatible with automated high-throughput screens. Proof of applicability was shown for two therapeutic molecule classes and two relevant functional screening read-outs. First, the miniaturized production of biparatopic anti-c-MET antibody–drug conjugates served as a proof of concept for their applicability in cytotoxic screenings on tumor cells with different target expression levels. Second, the automated workflow enabled a large unbiased combinatorial screening of biparatopic antibodies and the identification of hits mediating potent c-MET degradation. The presented workflow utilizes standard equipment and may serve as a facile, efficient and robust method for the discovery of innovative therapeutic agents in many laboratories worldwide

Application of multivariate curve resolution alternating least squares (MCR-ALS) to the quantitative analysis of pharmaceutical and agricultural samples

10 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables.-- PMID: 18371770 [PubMed].-- Available online Aug 30, 2007.Application of multivariate curve resolution alternating least squares (MCR-ALS), for the resolution and quantification of different analytes in different type of pharmaceutical and agricultural samples is shown. In particular, MCR-ALS is applied first to the UV spectrophotometric quantitative analysis of mixtures of commercial steroid drugs, and second to the near-infrared (NIR) spectrophotometric quantitative analysis of humidity and protein contents in forage cereal samples. Quantitative results obtained by MCR-ALS are compared to those obtained using the well established partial least squares regression (PLSR) multivariate calibration method.Peer reviewe