A multifactorial role for P. falciparum malaria in endemic Burkitt's lymphoma pathogenesis.

Endemic Burkitt's lymphoma (eBL) arises from the germinal center (GC). It is a common tumor of young children in tropical Africa and its occurrence is closely linked geographically with the incidence of P. falciparum malaria.

Cigarette smoke worsens lung inflammation and impairs resolution of influenza infection in mice.

Background: Cigarette smoke has both pro-inflammatory and immunosuppressive effects. Both active and passive cigarette smoke exposure are linked to an increased incidence and severity of respiratory virus infections, but underlying mechanisms are not well defined. We hypothesized, based on prior gene expression profiling studies, that upregulation of pro-inflammatory mediators by short term smoke exposure would be protective against a subsequent influenza infection.

Epstein-Barr virus: a paradigm for persistent infection - for real and in virtual reality.

The really interesting thing about herpesviruses is that they can establish lifelong persistant infections in immunocompetent hosts. At first glance, they would seem to have very different ways of doing this. Here we will use as a model our current understanding of how the human herpesvirus Epstein-Barr virus establishes and maintains such an infection.

A virtual look at Epstein-Barr virus infection: biological interpretations.

The possibility of using computer simulation and mathematical modeling to gain insight into biological and other complex systems is receiving increased attention. However, it is as yet unclear to what extent these techniques will provide useful biological insights or even what the best approach is. Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) provides a good candidate to address these issues.

An insight-based longitudinal study of visual analytics.

Visualization tools are typically evaluated in controlled studies that observe the short-term usage of these tools by participants on preselected data sets and benchmark tasks. Though such studies provide useful suggestions, they miss the long-term usage of the tools. A longitudinal study of a bioinformatics data set analysis is reported here.

Arrested spread of vesicular stomatitis virus infections in vitro depends on interferon-mediated antiviral activity.

A quantitative understanding of the innate immune response will enable its recruitment against emerging, poorly characterized, or weaponized viral pathogens. To gain insights into how the innate responses can limit viral spread, we used quantitative focal infections to study how the spread of recombinant vesicular stomatitis viruses (VSV) on baby hamster kidney (BHK) and delayed brain tumor (DBT) cell monolayers is affected by innate cellular antiviral responses. We observed that rates of infection spread correlated with one-step growth rankings for four ectopic VSV strains: N1, N2, N3, and N4.

Propagation of viruses on micropatterned host cells.

We have developed a technique to characterize the in vitro propagation of viruses. Microcontact printing was used to generate linear arrays of alkanethiols on gold surfaces, which served as substrates for the patterned culture of baby hamster kidney (BHK-21) cells. Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) was added to unpatterned cell reservoirs adjacent to the patterned cells and incubated, setting in motion a continuously advancing viral infection into the patterned cells.