Brucella abortus, a gram negative, facultative intracellular pathogen causes brucellosis in many animal species and humans. Although live, attenuated vaccines are available against this infection, they suffer from certain limitations. Therefore, the development of an effective subunit vaccine against brucellosis is an area of intense research. The outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of Brucella species have been extensively studied for its immunogenicity and protective ability. We have investigated the potential of CpG ODN to enhance the immunogenicity and protective efficacy of recombinant 28 kDa outer membrane protein (rOMP28) of Brucella melitensis. The study demonstrated vigorous immunoglobulin G (IgG) response of OMP28. The administration of rOMP28 with CpG caused increased cell mediated immune response in terms of induced IgG2a, T-cell proliferation and up-regulation of type I cytokine expression. In contrast, the free antigen suppressed the interferon gamma (type I cytokine) production on in-vitro stimulation of spleenocytes. The result indicates the role of OMP28 in the down regulation of IFN-gamma production. Moreover, the B. abortus S-19 vaccinated mice showed highest production of IL-4 and IFN-gamma. The protective ability of the antigen was evaluated by systemic bacterial clearance after challenging the mouse with B. abortus 544 pathogen. The level of protection was significant in rOMP28+CpG treated mice but was lower than the required level. The results of the present study indicate that rOMP28 could be an immunogen capable of inducing both humoral and cellular immune response. The humoral response was biased towards Th1 type when it was co-administered with CpG.

Brucellosis is a zoonosis of both public health and economic importance in many developing countries including India. Early detection and segregation of the infected animals are important in order to control the disease. Serodiagnostic tests for brucellosis is mainly based on detection of antibodies developed against lipopolysaccharide (LPS) component of cell. In this study we evaluated a protein antigen, 28 kDa outer membrane protein (OMP28), of Brucella melitensis as an alternative to LPS. Recombinant OMP28 was produced in Escherichia coli system. The efficacy of purified OMP28 was studied in an indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for diagnosis of brucellosis in field sera collected from different regions of country. Using known negative and known positive serum samples it was found that OMP28 is immunoreactive to Brucella infected cattle, sheep, goat and dog sera. Three hundred and eighty two cattle sera were screened by OMP28 antigen-based ELISA and the results were compared to rose Bengal plate agglutination Test (RBPT). Recombinant OMP28 antigen-based ELISA has shown sensitivity of 88.7%, specificity of 93.8% and accuracy of 92.9%. It was concluded that recombinant B. melitensis OMP28 could be used as a protein antigen for diagnosis of brucellosis in domestic animals.

Optical scanning is one of the emerging evaluation tools used for obtaining dose distributions in gel dosimetry. A radiation field analyzer adapted into an optical CT scanner to evaluate an irradiated Fricke gel has been already reported by others. This prototype optical CT scanner functions like a first generation x-ray CT scanner in the translate-rotate fashion. A similar scanner was constructed in our department for optical scanning of irradiated FX gel. At first, an aquarium was constructed and fitted into the water phantom of the RFA with provision to place the gel phantom to be scanned along with a light source and detector. The movements of the RFA were utilized to scan the gel phantom. A scan of a cuvette filled with colored solution was carried out and the resulting images were reconstructed and profiles obtained to evaluate the working of the optical scanner. A scan of the gel phantom was then obtained to evaluate the performance of the scanner. Thus a radiation field analyzer (DYNASCAN) was successfully adapted to an optical scanner to evaluate Fricke gels in our department.

Brucella melitensis is an organism of paramount zoonotic importance. The 28 kDa outer membrane protein (OMP) is one of the immunodominant antigens of B. melitensis. The gene encoding 28 kDa OMP (omp28) has been amplified from B. melitensis Rev. 1 strain. A PCR product of 753 bp, encoding complete omp28 gene of B. melitensis, was obtained. The gene was further cloned and sequenced. The nucleotide sequence of B. melitensis Rev. 1 strain showed substitution of 2 nucleotides from that of 16M strain.

.NET platform from Microsoft encompasses a whole array of technologies. connected systems , smart devices and web centric computing are a few key terms associated with .Net. These terms could be categorized under the more general denominator of distributed systems. In short, .NET offers a complete package of tools and technologies for developing applications especially targeted towards distributed systems. The most important part of .NET is the .NET Framework, which consists of an execution environment for applications and a comprehensive class library. The framework includes .NET Remoting in order to support the development of distributed applications. This is an extensible Distributed Object Computing (DOC) middleware infrastructure comparable to the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) although the latter is based on an entirely different architecture. The .NET Compact Framework is a slimmed down version of the .NET Full Framework made to run on embedded devices such as PDAs and smart phones . Considering the resource limitations of these devices, a dedicated execution environment was crafted by omitting some classes and methods of the standard .NET class library. Unfortunately, .NET Remoting was an important feature that got eliminated. As a result, a communication barrier exists between the .NET Full Framework and the .NET Compact Framework. The absence of .NET Remoting in the .NET Compact Framework puts some serious constraints on the development of connected smart clients. Advanced Wifi enabled PDAs and smart phones have created the need to extend existing distributed applications to incorporate these smart clients. However, the lack of support for .NET Remoting on these devices makes it hard to integrate them into legacy systems, often built with that technology. In this paper we propose a mechanism that enables smart clients running the .NET Compact Framework to access these Remoting objects to a certain extent, with little overhead for the programmer and little changes to be made to the existing distributed application. Our approach focuses on client/server architectures where the server is not aware of any objects on the client, while the client can see and access objects on the server. Our solution uses .NET Remoting's built-in extension support (on the server) and a custom extension to the existing web services support on the client. In the next section, .NET Remoting and web services are discussed in detail and a list of requirements for our solution is presented. In section 3 we explain the concepts that solve the basic requirements. These concepts are then used as the foundation to solve other requirements discussed in section 4. We discuss our implementation of the basic concepts and some practical results in section 5. We round up the paper by drawing conclusions, summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of our solution and giving suggestions for future improvement in section 6. 2. Distributed Applications The .NET Framework offers .NET Remoting and web services as high-level technologies for developing distributed systems. This section introduces the parts of these technologies that are relevant for the rest of the paper and it points out the constraints involved when using web services instead of .NET Remoting. We conclude this section by giving a minimum set of requirements for a useful solution.