L3 Bank
Milan Trpis continues to maintain the O. volvulus
L3 bank at Johns Hopkins. With the political strife in Liberia, both of
our collectors (Sara Lustigman from the New York Blood Center, and Milan
Trpis) were forced to move to new locations. Sara has successfully relocated
to Cameroon while Milan was working out of Cote d'Ivoire. While collections
at both facilities were successful, problems soon became apparent when the
new L3's were tested in David Abraham's mouse chamber model (see article
by Abraham). With a great deal of resolve, David, with much cooperation
from both Milan and Sara, went about attacking the problems. After some
time, it was agreed that collection in Cote d'Ivoire would end while the
Cameroon facility would remain up and running. The good news is that David
has worked out the problems with the L3's in his model and the Johns Hopkins
facility now has a good supply of L3's that we can make available to investigators.
At latest count, Milan is currently maintaining approximately 120,000 L3's
from Cote d'Ivoire (cryopreserved without bovine serum), and 600,000 L3's
from Cameroon (cryopreserved with bovine serum). Any investigators in need
of L3's should contact Cathy Steel.
Serum Bank
Niggi Weiss is still maintaining the EMCF serum bank
at the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel. In addition to the sera from
Ecuador (collected by Tom Nutman and Lynne Elson), we now have collections
from Guatemala (Victor Tsang), Nigeria (Ade Ogunrinade), and most recently
from Togo (Peter Soboslay). All of these collections have been aliquoted.
There is also a collection from Cameroon (from Joseph Donfack) which has
not yet been sent to Basel. In these collections are sera from adults who
have high microfilarial (mf) and nodule counts, low mf and nodule counts,
or nodules but no mf. There are also sera from "putatively immune"
individuals, individuals with sowda, and children who are infected. While
each patient group may not be represented in every collection, these are
still valuable resources which investigators can use for their own studies.
Researchers are encouraged to make use of these serum collections and should
contact Cathy Steel if interested in obtaining aliquots from Niggi's bank.
New Oncho Literature Database
With funding from the EMCF, Dr. Mark
Blaxter, at the Institute of Cell, Animal, and Population Biology (University
of Edinburgh), will update the database (the Bibliography of Onchocerciasis,
1841-1985) collected by Ralf Muller at CABI, and will subsequently make
it available to the world filariasis community through the internet and
by disk. Mark proposes to construct two databases - one an extension of
the full "Filariasis Association Bibliography" (which was used
in the compilation of Muller's bibliography), and the second, an onchocerciasis
relevant subset. The datasets will be made available over the internet
in four ways: 1) as a Gopher archive 2) as a World Wide Web site 3) as an
adjunct to the Filarial Genome Project database FilDB and 4) as an ftp archive.
Mark has asked that anyone with comments or suggestions should contact
him, preferably by e-mail at <Mark.Blaxter@ed.ac.uk>. He can also
be contacted by phone at 44-131-650-6760 or by FAX at -650-5450. He specifically
would like to produce formatted versions of the bibliography in as many
database formats as is possible (ProCite, Refer, Reference Manager, EndNote,
Filemaker, etc.) and needs to know what the user base will need. This will
be particularly important for users in countries with less efficient access
to the internet.
The EMCF Goes Electronic
Sometime in the hopefully not too distant
future, the Greene Sheet is going to go electronic and become part of that
great world known as the internet. This will hopefully allow us to get
information to everyone at a much quicker pace, as well as allowing investigators
to easily submit information to be posted to the Greene Sheet. For those
who do not have internet access yet (or have not yet accepted the electronic
age) - not to worry - we will continue to send hard copies of information
from the Greene Sheet to you. We will let everyone know when all of this
is beginning and will give you the World Wide Web address. For those who
will still require a hard copy of the newsletter to be sent, you can notify
me (Cathy Steel) at that time. We also hope to be able to add in links
to other sites that might be of interest to everyone (and, no, this does
not mean linking to the pictures in the latest issues of Playboy or Playgirl
- those you have to get on your own). So here's to the Clark Foundation
Oncho World's entrance to the future!
Updating Current Addresses, etc.
Anyone who has changed addresses since
the last Woods Hole Meeting, please send an update of your current whereabouts.
In addition, if you now have a new e-mail address, fax number, and/or phone
number, we would like to know this too. This information should be sent
to me (Cathy Steel) by mail, phone, fax, or e-mail (take your pick). We
would also like to know if you are aware of anyone not receiving the Greene
Sheet that would like to.
Send information to:
Meeting in May Sponsored by the EMCF Oncho Task Force:
In May, 1995,
the Oncho Task Force sponsored a small meeting in New York which brought
together a few investigators involved in the vaccine screening program as
well as some Oncho Task Force members. The purposes were to discuss problems
which have been encountered and some interesting ideas for future thought
(see articles by David Abraham and Richard Lucius). In attendance at the
meeting were David Abraham, Richard Lucius, Sara Lustigman, Milan Trpis,
Steve Williams, Ted Bianco, Eric Ottesen, and Jeff Mecaskey.
Call for New Antigens:
With the vaccine screens up and running,
anyone who has antigens to submit now or in the near future are encouraged
to contact me (Cathy Steel). I will send you a sheet to fill out which
you will send back to me describing the antigen, after which, we will notify
David Abraham and Richard Lucius. For testing in the vaccine trials, both
David and Richard would like to receive approximately 1 mg each; you should
also include any controls as well as instructions regarding how to "handle"
your particular antigen (i.e. solubility requirements).