Just recently I came across a paper of David Marsh in 1992 on a major allergy gene “Fact or Fancy”. Many years later, the response is clear! Nevertheless the title remains popular at pubmed for reviews (N=42) – did they all read Asimov?
I have already seen this data in Washington and even talked to one of the two first authors (pun!) at the airport – the first genomewide scan for atopic dermatitis is now being online at the nature genetics website. The overall effects are disppointing small – my quick plot gives the cumulative (sic!) negative log p values.
Continue reading Why just C11orf30?
A new editorial in one of my most favorite journals now finds that immune cell signal transduction is just too complicated to be effectively queried using traditional methods and mindsets – something that I felt for some long time to be true not only for immunology for also for genetics, yea, yea.
Thanks to the great audience in Washington DC watching our pro-con show about vitamin D and allergy. Are you still wondering about all the monkeys on my opponent’s slides? Me too…
With having fever from a flu on the way back to Europe, a picture came to my mind showing the 3 apes that are unable to see, hear and speak …
Mail me if there remain any doubts about the Th1 blocking effect of D3 or go to one of the recent reviews – I have take this for granted as it is even in standard textbooks like Roitt’s Immunology. Continue reading Three unwise monkeys
An American team believes to describe science activity by web clicks on journal pages.
Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia.
with the conclusion Continue reading Clickstreams
There seems to be a GWAS repository that has an entry of an asthma study otherwise not known in the biomedical literature and – as see on the screenshot -results tables are empty. Continue reading Factory science
It’s a pleasant experience to write something that is being translated afterwards into so many languages afterwards. It is, however, irritating that this dissemination is irrespective of what I (and all second and third hand journalists and translators) understand of this curious world.
I already suspect that science has more to do with believes than religion. However, only very recently I came across this paper (when working on eosinophils) that stretches this view to its limits: “Eosinophil cells, pray tell us what you do!” Or is that a new incarnation of Spinoza’s God in Nature?
There are not two cells in the human body that have an identical DNA sequence as detailed here earlier. But not only ageing, already basic B and T cell recombination introduces variation. And there might be more: HLA micropolymorphism! Continue reading TCR-HLA-B*4405(EENLLDFVRF)
A recent ERJ correspondence letter highlights vitamin D (among other others) as sensitizer at the workplace.
Skin sensitisers are typically more hydrophobic than respiratory sensitisers. Both water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins are used as additives in the food industry. Exposure at work to both of the above classes of vitamin compounds may occur, resulting in respiratory and skin sensitisation of workers during the manufacturing process.
The hygiene hypothesis usually assumes an “underemployed” system that is directed against self-defined allergen targets – a rather mechanistic view of a half filled barrel. A new Nature paper on memory CD8 T-cells now explains why this view is rather odd Continue reading Another challenge of the hygiene hypothesis
Here is what worked for me: Start up MS SQL server and run a tool that can be compiled from sources at Codeproject. Transfer the resulting SQLITE3 database to the Mac where it can be accessed by R via the RSQLite library. Many thanks to Liron Levi and his patient help with tables having more than 1000 columns!
I am in the process of setting up a graphical ER management tool while the native ODBC driver still seem to have some problems. Any workaround is greatly appreciated.
Blood has now also an account on the vitamin hypothesis.
Following some earlier descriptions in Reed 1932, Selye 1962, Wjst 1999 and Wieringa 2008, the discovery frequency seems to increase – a good sign for some progress. Bischoff writes about vitamin A where we have only some limited evidence.
Here is the abstract of another pro D3 article by Gilchrest in the AJCN with a few comments by me (notJuan Carlos) Continue reading Porque no te callas?
I had already a thread here about asthma and iatrogenic factors last month including estrogens, vaccines, antibiotics, vitamin D, paracetamol, and Caesarean section. There may be even another kid on the block: folate. At least in mice in utero supplementation with methyl donors enhances allergic airway disease Continue reading Asthma: a iatrogenic disease cont’d
