Ursodeoxycholyl lysophosphatidylethanolamide may thus be used as an agent to prevent hepatic ischemia reperfusion.”
“We analysed the genotypes of 325 Mycobacterium tuberculosis clinical isolates obtained during 2002 throughout Japan. The genotyping methods included insertion sequence IS61 10 RFLP, spoligotyping and variable number of tandem repeat (VNTR) analyses. Clustered isolates revealed by IS61 10 RFLP analysis accounted for 18.5% (60/325) of the isolates. Beijing genotype tuberculosis (TB) accounted for 73.8% (240/325) of the isolates. Using VNTR, we analysed 35 loci, including 12 standard mycobacterial interspersed repetitive

units and 4 exact tandem repeats. The discriminatory power of these 16 loci was low. Using VNTR analyses of the 35 loci, 12 loci (VNTRs 0424, 0960, 1955, 2074, check details 2163b, 2372, 2996, 3155, 3192, 3336, 4052 and 4156) were selected for the genotyping of Beijing genotype strains. buy Compound C Comparison of the discriminatory power of the 12-locus VNTR [Japan Anti-Tuberculosis Association (JATA)] to that of the 15-locus and 24-locus VNTRs proposed by Supply et al (2006) showed that our established

VNTR system was superior to the reported 15-locus VNTR and had almost equal discriminatory power to the 24-locus VNTR. This 12-locus VNTR (JATA) can therefore be used for TB genotyping in areas where Beijing family strains are dominant.”
“There is a growing demand for a cost-effective, efficient, and high-throughput method

for measuring cytokines. Currently, many studies are using flow cytometric bead-based multiplex assays in the measurement of cytokines. However, limited data are available regarding the performance of these cytometric bead assays versus enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) or correlation with mRNA expression using real time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). In one of our studies, cytometric bead array (CBA) was used to measure inflammatory cytokine protein levels in bronchoalveolar buy BMS-777607 lavage (BAL) samples from mice exposed to welding fume, an inflammatory particulate. The results were then compared to whole lung mRNA levels of the same cytokines measured by real time RT-PCR in the same mouse model. It was found that the trends in cytokine profiles measured via CBA agreed with the whole lung mRNA results. In a separate experiment, we used a rat zymosan infectivity model to induce a pulmonary immunomodulatory response and determined cytokine concentrations in recovered BAL fluid by ELISA and two different types of cytometric bead-based assays, CBA and FlowCytomix (FC). The sample-to-sample correlation was good between ELISA and CBA with correlation coefficient R values of 0.76, 0.66, and 0.92 for rat IFN-gamma, TNF-alpha, and IL-6, respectively. ELISA only correlated significantly with the FC assay for TNF-alpha with R = 0.43.