Garnet's Life Adventures

still waiting

So in attempts to keep myself busy whilst STILL waiting for reagents to arrive, I did leave early yesterday just around 14.00, after of course having a leisurely lunch with MissyLou, Jeremy, and ML's lil brother Neal who were on their way to Aberdeen (Scotland) for Neal's college graduation ceremony which is today.

I got home around 15.45 since I stopped to do a bit of food shopping at Tescos. When Estee got home we decided to go for a walk around the neighbourhood & check out the library, since the weather looked like it might not piss down on us (first time all day that it looked semi clear sky). We walked up to the high street, around a block, popped into the library where we got membership forms, then headed back home. We sat out on the swinging benches in our garden chatting for a bit & then made some dinner, before she headed off to meditation class at the rabbi's house and I went to read in my room & try to figure out why my phone was not working (still haven't figured that one out yet!!)

Today I've been to lab meeting & been reading an interesting paper, here's what I've learned thus far:

• Antigen (Ag) pulsed dendritic cells (DC) induced proliferation of naive spleen cells (ex-vivo)
• Ag pulsed DCs with CpG induced significant proliferation, with the CpG either as an adjuvant during injection or conditioning agent in culture), proving extraction of common epitopes from different strains
• Immunisation with DCs matured with CpG caused spleen cells to produce significantly more interferon gamma (IFNg) positive cells than those matured with antigen alone
• Serum titers were also higher
• immunisation with DCs matured with CpG = highest level of protection against challenge (80% with any of the 4 strains of bacteria) and immunisation with DCs and CpG adjuvant = high protection (60%) where as immunisation with DCs only gave 10% protection and naives had no protection
• post challenge survivors. showed no bacterial growth in blood or splenocytes - YEAH!!!

All of that proving that a vaccine that could stimulate DCs in situ to cause protective immune responses would be helpful against Burkholderia psuedomallei, since we all know that you can't just bung a bunch of cultured DCs into a humans arm because each individual would require a "personalised" vaccine . . . so we need to find a way to activate DCs, perhaps by binding recombinant B. psuedomallei antigens and toll-like receptor (TLR) ligands.

OKAY no more science talk . . . got nothing else to tell ya today, so I'll just let you go with a wish for a Happy Tuesday!!

Labels: work

posted by Sara @ 2:46 pm