Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Klaus Schughart.
The immune system is an important evolutionary invention to battle invaders in young and old organisms. Successful aging in humans who achieve nonagenarian status and beyond depends on how the immune system changes over time. Whether certain immune parameters vary with increased age is influenced by the genotype and lifestyle of the individual.
The chicken chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assay represents one of the most widely used in vivo screening assay for genes with angiogenic (blood vessel-inducing) or angiostatic (inhibition of vessel formation or their destruction) activities. Here we show that adenovirus gene transfer vectors infect cells in the CAM and lead to expression of the viral transgene. Furthermore, infection with an adenovirus vector containing the human vascular endothelial growth factor gene induced the formation of new blood vessels. This improved method saves a considerable amount of time in the identification of genes that can influence blood vessel formation because the expensive and time-consuming production and purification of recombinant protein can be omitted.
We isolated cancer cell-specific phages by subtracting and selecting complex peptide display phage libraries on cultured human cancer cells. The best candidate was selected by performing three rounds of subtraction before each of five selections on the human colorectal WiDr cell line. The phage showed more than 1000-fold higher binding efficiency for WiDr cells when compared to five other human cancer cell lines, including two of colorectal origin, and when compared to wild-type M13 phage. Fifty-fold higher binding efficiency was also seen for a human breast cancer cell line. We show that the WiDr cell binding of the selected phage was efficiently competed by the synthetic peptide HEWSYLAPYPWF, predicted from the phage sequence. This confirms that the specificity of the peptide is independent of the display by the phage coat proteins. The identified peptide may target biomarkers linked to colorectal cancer, and thus be useful for designing gene transfer vectors as well as diagnostic and prognostic tools for this disease.
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