Advances in the Production and Batch Reformatting of Phage Antibody Libraries.

Phage display antibody libraries have proven an invaluable resource for the isolation of diagnostic and potentially therapeutic antibodies, the latter usually being antibody fragments converted into IgG formats. Recent advances in the production of highly diverse and functional antibody libraries are considered here, including for Fabs, scFvs and nanobodies. These advances include codon optimisation during generation of CDR diversity, improved display levels using novel signal sequences, molecular chaperones and isomerases and the use of highly stable scaffolds with relatively high expression levels.

In vitro amplification of H-type atypical bovine spongiform encephalopathy by protein misfolding cyclic amplification.

The in vitro amplification of prions by serial protein misfolding cyclic amplification has been shown to detect PrP to levels at least as sensitive as rodent bioassay but in a fraction of the time. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is a zoonotic prion disease in cattle and has been shown to occur in 3 distinct forms, classical BSE (C-BSE) and 2 atypical BSE forms (L-BSE and H-BSE). Atypical forms are usually detected in asymptomatic, older cattle and are suggested to be spontaneous forms of the disease.

Canine units: the softer side of security.

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Glucose stimulates the association of Crk with p130Cas in pancreatic beta cells.

Objectives: Previously, we demonstrated glucose-induced beta-cell tyrosine phosphorylation of p130Cas, a protein containing 15 YXXP repeats that can become tyrosine phosphorylated and bind Src-homology 2 (SH2)-containing proteins. In light of the importance of p130Cas in other cell types, we determined which beta-cell proteins exhibited glucose-induced association with p130Cas.

Methods: beta cells were stimulated with glucose and/or the muscarinic agonist carbachol to determine which SH2-containing adapter proteins underwent glucose-induced association with p130Cas.

Glucose stimulates the tyrosine phosphorylation of Crk-associated substrate in pancreatic beta-cells.

Several years ago, we demonstrated that glucose induced tyrosine phosphorylation of a 125-kDa protein (p125) in pancreatic beta-cells (Konrad, R. J., Dean, R.