Isolation of recombinant antibodies directed against surface proteins of Clostridium difficile

Clostridium difficile has emerged as an increasingly important nosocomial pathogen and the prime causative agent of antibiotic-associated diarrhoea and pseudomembranous colitis in humans. In addition to toxins A and B, immunological studies using antisera from patients infected with C. difficile have shown that a number of other bacterial factors contribute to the pathogenesis, including surface proteins, which are responsible for adhesion, motility and other interactions with the human host. In this study, various clostridial targets, including FliC, FliD and cell wall protein 66, were expressed and purified. Phage antibody display yielded a large panel of specific recombinant antibodies, which were expressed, purified and characterised. Reactions of the recombinant antibodies with their targets were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay; and Western blotting suggested that linear rather than conformational epitopes were recognised. Binding of the recombinant antibodies to surface-layer proteins and their components showed strain specificity, with good recognition of proteins from C. difficile 630. However, no reaction was observed for strain R20291—a representative of the 027 ribotype. Binding of the recombinant antibodies to C. difficile M120 extracts indicated that a component of a surface-layer protein of this strain might possess immunoglobulin-binding activities. The recombinant antibodies against FliC and FliD proteins were able to inhibit bacterial motility

A Muscle Model Based on Feldman's Lambda Model: 3D Finite Element Implementation

This paper presents the introduction of Feldman's muscle model in a three dimensional continuum finite element model of the human face. This model is compared to the classical Hill-type muscle modelComment: CMBBE'2013, Salt Lake City : United States (2013

Hermite-Hadamard type inequalities for operator geometrically convex functions

In this paper, we introduce the concept of operator geometrically convex functions for positive linear operators and prove some Hermite-Hadamard type inequalities for these functions. As applications, we obtain trace inequalities for operators which give some refinements of previous results.Comment: Accepted for publishing in Monatshefte fur Mathemati