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A new immunoassay for the detection of hepatitis C core antigen (HCVcoreAg) in peripheral blood during serological window-phase was evaluated among healthy blood donors, commercially available hepatitis C virus (HCV) seroconversion panels and in-house specimens from individuals undergoing seroconversion. Among 1964 low-risk blood donor samples, seven samples were initially reactive but only one wa

Could honeybees' most valuable contribution to mankind besides pollination services be alternative tools against infections? Today, due to the emerging antibiotic-resistant pathogens, we are facing a new era of searching for alternative tools against infections. Natural products such as honey have been applied against human's infections for millennia without sufficient scientific evidence. A uniqu

There is a need for analytical methods capable of monitoring blood antibiotic levels in real time. Here we present a method for quantifying antibiotic levels in whole blood that does not require any sample pretreatment. The tests employ the enzyme penicillinase to assay for penicillin G, penicillin V and ampicillin using a flow-injected biosensor, the Enzyme Thermistor. Optimal flow rates, sample

Although Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder, in many patients cognitive dysfunction is an important clinical sign. It is not yet clear whether this is attributable solely to a decrease in dopamine levels, or whether other neurotransmitter systems might be involved as well. In the present study, the importance of the mesocorticolimbic dopamine pathway and a possible convergence with forebra

The classification of diseases has several important applications ranging from diagnosis and choice of treatment to demographics. To date, classifications have been successfully created manually, often within international consortia. Some groups of diseases, such as primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs), are especially hard to nosologically cluster due, on one hand, to the presence of a wide variety o

A major function of the immune system is to protect the host from microbial infections. The complement system plays important roles in both the innate and the adaptive immune defense and also acts as a bridge between these arms of immunity. This is obvious from complement deficiencies which in varying degree, depending on which factor is missing, are associated with increased infection susceptibil

Thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) is a pleiotropic cytokine, hitherto mostly known to be involved in inflammatory responses and immunoregulation. The human tslp gene gives rise to two transcription and translation variants: a long form (lfTSLP) that is induced by inflammation, and a short, constitutively-expressed form (sfTSLP), that appears to be downregulated by inflammation. The TSLP forms ca

We demonstrate how the problem of finding the effective property of quasiperiodic constitutive relations can be simplified to the periodic homogenization setting by transforming the original quasiperiodic material structure to a periodic heterogeneous material in a higher dimensional space. The characterization of two-scale cut-and-projection convergence limits of partial differential operators is

Since I finished my PhD thesis in June 2014, I have lived a stimulating but also somewhat precarious life at Lund University. It is no secret that permanent teaching positions are hard to come by, and during the time I have been teaching as temporary staff on a number of different courses, I have started to consider what the lack of permanent positions means for the pedagogical work carried out at

The fragmentation of 23S rRNA of 23 Haemophilus influenzae strains and eight strains belonging to other Haemophilus species was investigated. Instead of intact molecules, the 23S rRNA molecules were found to be cleaved into two to five smaller conserved fragments in most strains examined, especially in H. influenzae type b (5/6) and nontypeable strains (5/5). One or two conserved potential cleavag

Ergosterol was used as a marker of fungal biomass and 3-hydroxy fatty acids were used as markers of bacterial endotoxin to determine microbial colonisation of building materials by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Pieces (0.3-0.5 g) of materials from two water-damaged buildings were hydrolysed to liberate the markers from larger microbial structures; the preparations were then purified, deriv

A hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotyping PCR assay based on type-specific primers was expanded to include genotype 6a as well as genotypes 1a, 1b, 2a, and 3a. The nucleotide sequences of a 194-bp fragment in the center of the HCV core gene showed that the homologies between genotype 6a and genotypes 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, and 5 were 81.2, 82.1, 73.8, 77.3, 81.4, and 78.9%, respectively. A high degree of