Mice models serve as a valuable tool to study microbiome-immune system interactions. While the use of germ-free mice may represent the gold-standard method, antibiotic-based microbiome depletion provides a more cost-efficient and feasible system. The protocol here in presented provides a mild antimicrobial regime to deplete basal microbiota in 8-week-old C57BL/6 mice, aiming to ensure reproducibility in microbiota studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The rapid establishment and persistence of latent HIV-1 reservoirs is one of the main obstacles towards an HIV cure. While antiretroviral therapy supresses viral replication, it does not eradicate the latent reservoir of HIV-1-infected cells. Recent evidence suggests that the human microbiome, particularly the gut microbiome, may have the potential to modulate the HIV-1 reservoir.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElevated activity of retrotransposons is increasingly recognized to be implicated in a wide range of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases, including Down syndrome (DS), which is the most common chromosomal condition causing intellectual disability globally. Previous research by our group has revealed that treatment with lamivudine, a reverse transcriptase inhibitor, improved neurobehavioral phenotypes and completely rescued hippocampal-dependent recognition memory in a DS mouse model, Ts65Dn. We hypothesized that retrotransposition rates would increase in the Ts65Dn mouse model, and lamivudine could block retrotransposons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite the important role of gut microbiota in the maturation of the immune system, little is known about its impact on the development of T-cell responses to vaccination. Here, we immunized C57BL/6 mice with a prime-boost regimen using DNA plasmid, the Chimpanzee Adenovirus, and the modified Vaccinia Ankara virus expressing a candidate HIV T-cell immunogen and compared the T-cell responses between individuals with an intact or antibiotic-depleted microbiota. Overall, the depletion of the gut microbiota did not result in significant differences in the magnitude or breadth of the immunogen-specific IFNγ T-cell response after vaccination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study highlights the effectiveness, in one surgical stage, of two combined local techniques for perineal fistula repair in a patient with spinal cord injury: the " and the " from the inferior gluteal fold. Unlike the traditional , we harvested a ; by definition, this is a flap with a narrow diffuse microvascular supply aimed in our case at shielding the neourethra and substituting the remaining scarred perineum. The urethroplasty technique adopted, the has been based on sculpting two opposing local cutaneous flaps circumscribing the fistulous cutaneous openings.
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