My name is Sharron Zabary and I am a post-doc fellow in Tel Av
Shalom,

My name is Sharron Zabary and I am a post-doc fellow in Tel Aviv university (IL). I would like to inform you about a new fascinating research initiative.

Currently I am the coordinator of a research initiative called the Immune Holography Initiative (http://tamar.tau.ac.il/IH/) that was etablished in order to study the human immune development as reflected by antibody repertoires. We are using a antigen microarrays to characterize the antibody reactivities in various of body fluids; blood, saliva and milk.

We already started the research and studies the immune repertoires at birth and published the paper in PNAS:
Organization of the autoantibody repertoire in healthy newborns and adults revealed by system level informatics of antigen microarray data. PNAS, Vol. 106(34) pp 14484-14489 (2009). 
Abstract:
The immune system is essential to body defense and maintenance. Specific antibodies to foreign invaders function in body defense, and it has been suggested that autoantibodies binding to self molecules are important in body maintenance. Recently, the autoantibody repertoires in the bloods of healthy mothers and their newborns were studied using an antigen microarray containing hundreds of self molecules. It was found that the mothers expressed diverse repertoires for both IgG and IgM autoantibodies. Each newborn shares with its mother a similar repertoire of IgG antibodies, which cross the placental but its IgM repertoire is more similar to those of other newborns. Here, we took a system-level approach and analyzed the correlations between autoantibody reactivities of the previous data and extended the study to new data from newborns at birth and a week later, and from healthy young women. For the young women, we found modular organization of both IgG
 and IgM isotypes into antigen cliques—subgroups of highly correlated antigen reactivities. In contrast, the newborns were found to share a universal congenital IgM profile with no modular organization. Moreover, the IgG autoantibodies of the newborns manifested buds of the mothers' antigen cliques, but they were noticeably less structured. These findings suggest that the natural autoantibody repertoire of humans shows relatively little organization at birth, but, by young adulthood, it becomes sorted out into a modular organization of subgroups (cliques) of correlated antigens. These features revealed by antigen microarrays can be used to define personal states of autoantibody organizational motifs.


These days we are collecting samples from preterm and term infants and their mothers to test the effect of gestational age, mode of delivery and lack of breastfeeding/human milk. 

Please feel free to contact me for information about the study.

 -- Sharron
=======================================================
Sharron Bransburg-Zabary, PhD IBCLC
Post-Doc Fellow Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob Laboratory,
School of Physics and Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.
ISRAEL.
Phone: +972-54-4551342 
Email: [log in to unmask]
Home Page: http://tamar.tau.ac.il/~sharron/



      

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