[Herpesvirus type 8 and its implication in human pathology].

Herpesvirus type 8 or Kaposi's sarcoma-associated virus has been recently discovered and it is an etiologic agent of several known diseases. It has common features that link it with other representatives of the family Herpesviridae: similar structural elements and genomic organization, and the common mechanisms of replication. Nevertheless, this virus has a number of unique features that make it an interesting matter for investigations and currently central in modern medicine and biology. This overview is to draw attention to this representative of herpesviruses and to outline some epidemiological, pathogenetic, and molecular aspects of this problem.

[A method of detecting soluble immune complexes in tissue biopsies]. / Sposob vyiavleniia rastvorimykh immunnykh kompleksov v bioptatakh tkanei.

Pretreatment of cryostat slices of tissue biopsy specimens with 30-50% water ethanol mixture increases the rate of detection of immune complexes in the intercellular substance of the epidermis to 100% in patients with acantholytic pemphigus. This method permitted the detection of immune complexes in all the examined cases with benign familial Hailey-Hailey pemphigus, which has never been reported heretofore. The authors believe that 30-50% water-ethanol mixture is capable of soft denaturation of proteins, stabilizes the slightly affine antibody-antigen relations, and aggregates soluble immune complexes into larger protein formations, this preventing their washing out from tissues.