Incubation of UV-irradiated plasmid DNA with a protein extract prepared from Escherichia coli cells led to the production of mutations in the cro gene residing on the plasmid. The mutations were detected in a subsequent bioassay step, which involved transformation of an indicator strain with the plasmid DNA that was retrieved from the reaction mixture, followed by plating on lactose/MacConkey p...

It has been proposed that spin-polarized cosmic radiation can induce asymmetric changes in helical biopolymers may account for the emergence of biological homochirality. The parity violation weak interaction direct consequences on transport polarization ray showers. In this paper, we show muons retain their down to energies at which they initiate enantioselective mutagenesis. Therefore, are mos...

The OB-fold is a diverse structure superfamily based on a beta-barrel motif that is often supplemented with additional non-conserved secondary structures. Previous deletion mutagenesis and NMR hydrogen exchange studies of three OB-fold proteins showed that the structural stabilities of sites within the conserved beta-barrels were larger than sites in non-conserved segments. In this work we exam...

We have performed a comparative analysis of the insertion sites of engineered Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) insertional mutagenesis vectors that are based on the maize (Zea mays) transposable elements and Agrobacterium T-DNA. The transposon-based agents show marked preference for high GC content, whereas the T-DNA-based agents show preference for low GC content regions. The transposon-base...

Retroviral insertional mutagenesis in mouse hematopoietic tumors provides a potent cancer gene discovery tool in the post-genome-sequence era. To manage multiple high-throughput insertional mutagenesis screening projects, we developed the Retroviral Tagged Cancer Gene Database (RTCGD; http://RTCGD.ncifcrf.gov). A sequence analysis pipeline determines the genomic position of each retroviral inte...