Category Archives: Allergy

Allergy

Screening steroid activity

A paper in J Drug Target shows a nice property of a cell line

Eight repeats of the glucocorticoid response element (GRE) were cloned into […] vector, and the resulting recombinant plasmid […] was stably transfected into the 293E cells. The stable and sensitive cell line […] was selected by dexamethasone (DEX) using fluorescent microscopy and fluorescence-activated cell sorting. […] The expression of GFP4 in the cell line was under the control of GRE, up-regulated by DEX treatment and down-regulated by phorbol myristate acetate (PMA).

as it could be nicely used for the steroid activity of any compound.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy

Forgotten papers: Allergy origins in the gut

Instead of highlighting the best paper in 2007, I decided to nominate now the most under valued paper in 2007. There are so many interesting (and probably highly important) studies that do not get enough initial attention and consecutively fail to enter the high citation track. Here is one of these papers that is as interesting as on the day of publication: Continue reading Forgotten papers: Allergy origins in the gut →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy, Vitamins

Hans Selye: Ancestor of the allergy vitamin hypothesis

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I spent a lot of time in libraries verifying bibliographic lists as I expected that somebody else could have had the idea of allergy induction by vitamin D before — in particular when being closer to the introduction of vitamin D supplements. Fortunately Science Magazine now offers a fulltext search of their archives (what is currently not possible with old Nature volumes). I could locate about 70% of the computer hits when searching manually the Science index for vitamin and hayfever. The loss of about one third could be mainly attributed to the fact that extra supplement pages have only occasionally preserved in the libraries that I have visited for this project (Marburg, Berlin, München STABI + TUM, Garching). Text recognition is also limited, so my results may be preliminary.

What I found this afternoon in the library at TUM Garching Continue reading Hans Selye: Ancestor of the allergy vitamin hypothesis →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy

Endocrine disruptors

This is a topic occasionally popping up (frequently after some spectacular press article) but there doesn´t seem so much systematic research. Only recently I came across an article on plastic additives and surfactants (alkylphenols) that can suppress Th1 development – so is plastic the “Western life style factor”? The only other study that I have heard before is about benzophenone, octylphenol, and tributyltin chloride (TBT).

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy, Genetics

Best allergy paper 2007

The end of the year 2007 is approaching very fast. I can already vote for the best allergy paper in 2007 – it is a paper from Vienna by Victoria Leb about the molecular and functional analysis of the Ambrosia antigen T cell receptor. They have been able to isolate and transfer alpha (TRAV17-TRAJ45) and beta chain (TRBV18,TRBD1 and TRBJ2-7) TCR chains into Jurkat cells and even other human blood lymphocytes with convicing evidence that the infected cells were Ambrosia Art V1 reactive.
This opens brand new perspectives for developing a truely allergic TCR transgenic mouse that can be easily challenged and desensitized. It may even allow immediate testing of a variety of substance (and constructs) to ultimately cure allergy. My favorite is to feed DCs with antigen coupled to a T cell suicide program on succesfull antigen presentation.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy, Genetics

Finally the ß2 receptor

The full crystal structure of the ß2 receptor is now clear after many attempts for its low natural abundance – with the extracellular domain still difficult to resolve (more on the relevance of the mutations depicted in Fig.1 in my recent Lancet editorial). Interesting: the effects of mutations on distant sites by breaking off van der Waals interactions like I135 that disrupt a ionic lock simply by a more loosely packed molecule.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy, Genetics, Software

GPS for biological pathways

After running a dual core CPU for two weeks I have a list here of all transcripts that are associated with the “ORMDL3” SNP gene cluster. Making sense from this list is a difficult task even with dozen of dedicated websites.
To get an overview of what is available I would start Continue reading GPS for biological pathways →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025
Allergy

Eat peanut to avoid peanut allergy

There is a new comment in the BMJ about a Lords committee report

a number of recent epidemiological studies had indicated that early peanut consumption in countries such as Israel was associated with a low incidence of peanut allergy in the population. These observations had led many academics to say that exposing a child’s immune system to peanut allergen at an early age might result in tolerance.

It seems that allergen avoidance versus sportively exposure is a never ending story – forth and back and back and forth – and largely irrelevant as being only about the second line of defense?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 17.12.2025