Figure 1.
Lipid transfer proteins (LTP) included in the homemade array were separated by SDS-PAGE and stained with Coomassie Blue.
Replicas were electrotransferred and incubated with polyclonal antibodies produced against peach LTP (dilution 1∶500). The name of the proteins corresponds to Table I.
Figure 2.
Frequency of LTP sensitization.
A. Recognition frequencies of food and pollen LTPs comparing fruit allergic patients with and without pollen sensitization (Pollen Fruit Allergy and Fruit Allergy, respectively). The recognition frequencies, shown as percentage of positive response (%), were obtained incubating the LTP microarray with single sera from allergic patients. B. Analysis of LTP crossreactivities by inhibition assays using the LTP microarray as solid phase and Pru p 3, Art v 3 and Cas s 8 (5, 1, 0.1, 0.01 µg/mL) as inhibitors. The inhibition percentage of the IgE binding capacity is indicated. Means (n = 3) and SDs (bars) are represented. All tests were performed in triplicate.
Table 1.
Purified proteins included in the LTP microarray.
Table 2.
Clinical data of patients included in this study.
Figure 3.
Co-sensitization graph of LTP allergens.
Each node represents one allergen (LTP, white ovals non-LTP allergens, blue squares) and the links represent co-sensitization of one or more sera for the linked allergens. The weight of each link, between 0 and 1, measures the degree of co-sensitization. For the sake of clarity, only the 35 links of weights greater than 0.55 of the total 190 existing links are plotted.
Table 3.
Average weight of allergens included in the co-sensitization graph.
Figure 4.
Recognition frequencies of food and pollen LTPs by geographical area.
The recognition frequencies, shown as percentage of positive response (%), were obtained incubating the LTP microarray with single sera from allergic patients. Only LTPs with a positive response of more than 20% (taking all patients into account) are represented. Percentage positive responses and significant differences (p<0.05) are indicated.
Table 4.
Pollen counts (grains/m3 of air) of the regions included in the study.