Despite elevated incidence and recurrence rates for Primary Spontaneous Pneumothorax (PSP), little is known about its etiology, and the genetics of idiopathic PSP remains unexplored. To identify genetic variants contributing to sporadic PSP risk, we conducted the first PSP genome-wide association study. Two replicate pools of 92 Portuguese PSP cases and of 129 age- and sex-matched controls were allelotyped in t...
Thioredoxin-1 is a ubiquitous protein involved in phenotypical and functional changes in dendritic cells (DC). We investigated the effect of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), skin sensitizers, and irritants on thioredoxin-1 by Western blot and immunofluorescence and on mRNA by real-time PCR. As DC models, we used a skin DC line and DC derived from human blood monocytes. We observed that all tested chemicals increased t...
The development of non-animal methods for skin sensitization testing is an urgent challenge. Some of the most promising in vitro approaches are based on the analysis of phenotypical and functional modifications induced by sensitizers in dendritic cell models. In this work, we evaluated, for the first time, a fetal skin-derived dendritic cell line (FSDC) as a model to discriminate between sensitizers and irritan...