“Development of a vaccine for the common cold has been thw


“Development of a vaccine for the common cold has been thwarted by the fact that there are more than 100 serotypes of human rhinovirus (HRV). We

GDC-0994 clinical trial previously demonstrated that the HRV14 capsid is dynamic and transiently displays the buried N termini of viral protein 1 (VP1) and VP4. Here, further evidence for this “”breathing”" phenomenon is presented, using antibodies to several peptides representing the N terminus of VP4. The antibodies form stable complexes with intact HRV14 virions and neutralize infectivity. Since this region of VP4 is highly conserved among all of the rhinoviruses, antiviral activity by these anti-VP4 antibodies is cross-serotypic. The antibodies inhibit HRV16 infectivity in a temperature- and time-dependent manner consistent with the breathing behavior. Monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies raised against the 30-residue peptide do not react with peptides shorter than 24 residues, suggesting that these peptides are adopting three-dimensional conformations that are highly dependent upon the length of the peptide. Furthermore, there is evidence www.selleckchem.com/products/apo866-fk866.html that the N termini of VP4 are interacting with each other upon extrusion from the capsid. A Ser5Cys mutation in VP4 yields an infectious virus that forms cysteine cross-links in VP4 when the virus is incubated at room temperature but not at 4 degrees C. The fact that all of the VP4s are involved in this cross-linking

process strongly suggests that VP4 forms specific oligomers upon extrusion. Together these results suggest that it may be possible to develop a pan-serotypic

peptide vaccine to HRV, but its design will likely require details about see more the oligomeric structure of the exposed termini.”
“Corballis [Corballis, M. C. (2009). Comparing a single case with a control sample: Refinements and extensions. Neuropsychologia] offers an interesting position paper on statistical inference in single-case studies. The following points arise: (1) Testing whether we can reject the null hypothesis that a patient’s score is an observation from the population of control scores can be a legitimate aim for single-case researchers, not just clinicians. (2) Counter to the claim made by Corballis [Corballis, M. C. (2009). Comparing a single case with a control sample: Refinements and extensions. Neuropsychologia], Crawford and Howell’s [Crawford, J. R., & Howell, D. C. (1998). Comparing an individual's test score against norms derived from small samples. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 12, 482-486] method does test whether we can reject the above null hypothesis. (3) In all but the most unusual of circumstances Crawford and Howell’s method can also safely be used to test whether the mean of a notional patient population is lower than that of a control population, should neuropsychologists wish to construe the test in this way.

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