Microbial Genetic Screens for Monitoring Protein Misfolding Associated with Neurodegeneration: Tools for Identifying Disease-Relevant Genes and for Screening Synthetic and Natural Compound Libraries for the Discovery of Potential Therapeutics.

Neurodegenerative Diseases (ND) are a major threat to the aging population and the lack of a single preventive or disease-modifying agent only serves to increase their impact. In the past few years, protein misfolding and the subsequent formation of neurotoxic oligomeric/aggregated protein species have emerged as a unifying theme underlying the pathology of these complex diseases. Recently developed microbial genetic screens and selection systems for monitoring ND-associated protein misfolding have allowed the establishment of highthroughput assays for the identification of cellular factors and processes that are important mediators of NDassociated proteotoxicities.

Development of Escherichia coli Strains That Withstand Membrane Protein-Induced Toxicity and Achieve High-Level Recombinant Membrane Protein Production.

Membrane proteins perform critical cellular functions in all living organisms and constitute major targets for drug discovery. Escherichia coli has been the most popular overexpression host for membrane protein biochemical/structural studies. Bacterial production of recombinant membrane proteins, however, is typically hampered by poor cellular accumulation and severe toxicity for the host, which leads to low final biomass and minute volumetric yields.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms of Toll-like receptors and susceptibility to infectious diseases.

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are the best-studied family of pattern-recognition receptors (PRRs), whose task is to rapidly recognize evolutionarily conserved structures on the invading microorganisms. Through binding to these patterns, TLRs trigger a number of proinflammatory and anti-microbial responses, playing a key role in the first line of defence against the pathogens also promoting adaptive immunity responses. Growing amounts of data suggest that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) on the various human TLR proteins are associated with altered susceptibility to infection.

Why bother with a COST Action? The benefits of networking in science.

A COST Action is a consortium of -mainly- European scientists (but open to international cooperation) working on a common research area, with the same subject; COST provides funding to the Actions for networking and dissemination activities, thus the participating scientists must have secured research funding from other national or European sources. COST funding is in the scale of approximately 100 kEuros per year and in this vein, it is often criticized both in that it does not fund research and the core science and in that its funding is 'limited'. However, COST with its instruments is an integral pillar of the European Research Area, and it is through its mission that a variety of aspects of the research environment, fundamental to the success of the research, are catered for; these include scientific networking, collaboration/exchange/training and dissemination activities.

Towards antigen-specific apheresis of pathogenic autoantibodies as a further step in the treatment of myasthenia gravis by plasmapheresis.

Myasthenia gravis (MG), a prototypic antibody-mediated autoimmune disease, presents an excellent target for scientific research aimed at a better understanding of the disease itself and the source that triggers an autoimmune reaction in an organism. MG is a neuromuscular disease caused mainly by an autoimmune response against the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (AChR) which interferes with neuromuscular transmission. This review focuses on our studies on the extracellular domains of human muscle AChR subunits in an effort to develop an approach for the specific therapeutic apheresis of autoantibodies from patients' sera using the immobilized subunits as immunoadsorbents.