Publications by authors named "Olivia Blake"
Urinary tract infection (UTI) represents the most common infection after kidney transplantation and remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality in kidney transplant (KT) recipients, with a potential impact on graft survival. UTIs after KT are usually caused by Gram-negative microorganisms. Other pathogens which are uncommon in the general population should be considered in KT patients, especially BK virus since an early diagnosis is necessary to improve the prognosis.
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- Several human-pathogenic arenaviruses, like Lassa virus, cause serious illnesses and require handling in specialized, high-biosafety conditions, making safe inactivation crucial for further research.* -
- A new protocol was developed using the less dangerous Morogoro arenavirus as a stand-in to test various inactivation methods while removing toxic chemicals before testing their effects in cell culture.* -
- The study confirmed ten new inactivation techniques that effectively lowered virus levels to undetectable amounts, resulting in a solid and adaptable protocol for future arenavirus research and diagnostics.*
Type I interferons (IFNs) are a family of cytokines that represent a first line of defense against virus infections. The 12 different IFN-α subtypes share a receptor on target cells and trigger similar signaling cascades. Several studies have collectively shown that this apparent redundancy conceals qualitatively different responses induced by individual subtypes, which display different efficacies of inhibition of HIV replication.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: HIV-1 transmission leads to a genetic bottleneck, with one or a few variants of the donor quasispecies establishing an infection in the new host. We aimed to characterize this bottleneck in more detail, by comparing the properties of HIV envelope glycoproteins from acute and chronic infections within the particular context of a male-to-male transmission cluster.
Design: We compared the genotypic and phenotypic properties of envelope glycoproteins from viral variants derived from five study participants from the same transmission cluster.