TY  - JOUR
A1  - Rovituso, Damiano M.
A1  - Duffy, Catharina E.
A1  - Schroeter, Michael
A1  - Kaiser, Claudia C.
A1  - Kleinschnitz, Christoph
A1  - Bayas, Antonios
A1  - Elsner, Rebecca
A1  - Kuerten, Stefanie
T1  - The brain antigen-specific B cell response correlates with glatiramer acetate responsiveness in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients
JF  - Scientific Reports
N2  - B cells have only recently begun to attract attention in the immunopathology of multiple sclerosis (MS). Suitable markers for the prediction of treatment success with immunomodulatory drugs are still missing. Here we evaluated the B cell response to brain antigens in n = 34 relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) patients treated with glatiramer acetate (GA) using the enzyme-linked immunospot technique (ELISPOT). Our data demonstrate that patients can be subdivided into responders that show brain-specific B cell reactivity in the blood and patients without this reactivity. Only in patients that classified as B cell responders, there was a significant positive correlation between treatment duration and the time since last relapse in our study. This correlation was GA-specific because it was absent in a control group that consisted of interferon-\(\beta\) (IFN-\(\beta\))-treated RRMS patients (n = 23). These data suggest that GA has an effect on brain-reactive B cells in a subset of patients and that only this subset benefits from treatment. The detection of brain-reactive B cells is likely to be a suitable tool to identify drug responders.
KW  - cortical pathology
KW  - natural history
KW  - disability
KW  - expression
KW  - antibodies
KW  - disease
KW  - lesions
KW  - trial
KW  - multiple sclerosis
Y1  - 2015
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-148172
VL  - 5
IS  - 14265
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Middelhoff, Frederike
T1  - Literary autozoographies: contextualizing species life in german animal autobiography
JF  - Humanities
N2  - What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as ‘literary autozoographies’, drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called ‘horse-science’. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.
KW  - animal autobiography
KW  - fictional autobiography
KW  - meta-autobiography
KW  - life writing
KW  - contextualist narratology
KW  - cultural and literary animal studies
KW  - poetics of knowledge
KW  - zoology
KW  - natural history
KW  - equine autozoography
KW  - horse-science
Y1  - 2017
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-198052
SN  - 2076-0787
VL  - 6
IS  - 2
PB  - MDPI
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kiryluk, Krzysztof
A1  - Yifu, Li
A1  - Sanna-Cherchi, Simone
A1  - Rohanizadegan, Mersedeh
A1  - Suzuki, Hitoshi
A1  - Eitner, Frank
A1  - Snyder, Holly J.
A1  - Choi, Murim
A1  - Hou, Ping
A1  - Scolari, Francesco
A1  - Izzi, Claudia
A1  - Gigante, Maddalena
A1  - Gesualdo, Loreto
A1  - Savoldi, Silvana
A1  - Amoroso, Antonio
A1  - Cusi, Daniele
A1  - Zamboli, Pasquale
A1  - Julian, Bruce A.
A1  - Novak, Jan
A1  - Wyatt, Robert J.
A1  - Mucha, Krzysztof
A1  - Perola, Markus
A1  - Kristiansson, Kati
A1  - Viktorin, Alexander
A1  - Magnusson, Patrik K.
A1  - Thorleifsson, Gudmar
A1  - Thorsteinsdottir, Unnur
A1  - Stefansson, Kari
A1  - Boland, Anne
A1  - Metzger, Marie
A1  - Thibaudin, Lise
A1  - Wanner, Christoph
A1  - Jager, Kitty J.
A1  - Goto, Shin
A1  - Maixnerova, Dita
A1  - Karnib, Hussein H.
A1  - Nagy, Judit
A1  - Panzer, Ulf
A1  - Xie, Jingyuan
A1  - Chen, Nan
A1  - Tesar, Vladimir
A1  - Narita, Ichiei
A1  - Berthoux, Francois
A1  - Floege, Jürgen
A1  - Stengel, Benedicte
A1  - Zhang, Hong
A1  - Lifton, Richard P.
A1  - Gharavi, Ali G.
T1  - Geographic Differences in Genetic Susceptibility to IgA Nephropathy: GWAS Replication Study and Geospatial Risk Analysis
JF  - PLoS Genetics
N2  - IgA nephropathy (IgAN), major cause of kidney failure worldwide, is common in Asians, moderately prevalent in Europeans, and rare in Africans. It is not known if these differences represent variation in genes, environment, or ascertainment. In a recent GWAS, we localized five IgAN susceptibility loci on Chr.6p21 (HLA-DQB1/DRB1, PSMB9/TAP1, and DPA1/DPB2 loci), Chr.1q32 (CFHR3/R1 locus), and Chr.22q12 (HORMAD2 locus). These IgAN loci are associated with risk of other immune-mediated disorders such as type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, or inflammatory bowel disease. We tested association of these loci in eight new independent cohorts of Asian, European, and African-American ancestry (N = 4,789), followed by meta-analysis with risk-score modeling in 12 cohorts (N = 10,755) and geospatial analysis in 85 world populations. Four susceptibility loci robustly replicated and all five loci were genome-wide significant in the combined cohort (P = 5x10\(^{-32}\) 3x10\(^{-10}\), with heterogeneity detected only at the PSMB9/TAP1 locus (I\(^{-2}\) = 0.60). Conditional analyses identified two new independent risk alleles within the HLA-DQB1/DRB1 locus, defining multiple risk and protective haplotypes within this interval. We also detected a significant genetic interaction, whereby the odds ratio for the HORMAD2 protective allele was reversed in homozygotes for a CFHR3/R1 deletion (P = 2.5x10\(^{-4}\)). A seven-SNP genetic risk score, which explained 4.7% of overall IgAN risk, increased sharply with Eastward and Northward distance from Africa (r = 0.30, P = 3x10\(^{-128}\)). This model paralleled the known East-West gradient in disease risk. Moreover, the prediction of a South-North axis was confirmed by registry data showing that the prevalence of IgAN-attributable kidney failure is increased in Northern Europe, similar to multiple sclerosis and type I diabetes. Variation at IgAN susceptibility loci correlates with differences in disease prevalence among world populations. These findings inform genetic, biological, and epidemiological investigations of IgAN and permit cross-comparison with other complex traits that share genetic risk loci and geographic patterns with IgAN.
KW  - linkage
KW  - genome-wide association
KW  - multiple sclerosis
KW  - renal disease
KW  - New mexico
KW  - recombination hotspot
KW  - italian population
KW  - natural history
KW  - HLA
KW  - glomerulonephritis
Y1  - 2012
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-130195
VL  - 8
IS  - 6
ER  -