To investigate whether genetic factors of innate immunity might influence susceptibility and/or progression in individuals infected with SARS, we evaluated the CD14 gene polymorphism in 198 Hong Kong blood donors and 152 Hong Kong severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) patients who were previously genotyped for FcgammaRIIA polymorphisms. The prevalence of the CD14-159CC polymorphism was signi...

BACKGROUND Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is induced in airways by virus and may mediate asthmatic airway remodeling. We sought to evaluate if genetic variants and early life lower respiratory infections jointly affect asthma risk. METHODS We included Latino children, adolescents, and young adults aged 8-21 years (1736 subjects with physician-diagnosed asthma and 1747 healthy contr...

The estrogen receptor (ER) plays an important role in mediating estrogen action on target tissues. ER-alpha, the most abundant, is found in all human reproductive tissues and studies on alpha-ER knockout mice have highlighted its role in reproduction. ER-alpha gene (ESR1) polymorphisms have been associated with a variety of disorders including human infertility. In this study, we examined the a...

Brazil is a country of continental dimension with a population of different ethnic backgrounds. Thus, a wide variation in the frequencies of hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotypes is expected to occur. To address this point, 1,688 sequential samples from chronic HCV patients were analyzed. HCV-RNA was amplified by the RT-PCR from blood samples collected from 1995 to 2000 at different laboratories lo...

A method for genotyping hepatitis B virus by partial HBsAg gene sequencing with primers common to all known genotypes was developed. Mutations related to anti-HBs resistance are also detected with this method. Samples from 103 Brazilian patients were analyzed. Precore and core region of these viruses were also sequenced in 101 patients. Genotypes A, B, C, D, and F were found with frequencies of...

22 We present a simple yet effective method to improve parentage assignment 23 (PA) accuracy an average of 47% compared to the PA programs PEDAPP 24 (39%), PASOS (53%), and CERVUS (50%) as measured over a wide range of 25 simulated scenarios. The method, termed sibship constraint (SC), uses the 26 results of sibship reconstruction (SR) to constrain assignments from PA output. 27 It works by ass...

Several polymorphisms in the vitamin D receptor (VDR) gene have been implicated as risk factors for prostate cancer. We performed a meta-analysis of 14 studies (17 comparisons) with TaqI genotyping (1870 prostate cancer cases; 2843 controls), 6 studies (8 comparisons) with poly(A) repeat genotyping (540 cases; 870 controls), 5 studies with BsmI genotyping (987 cases; 1504 controls), and 3 studi...

Post-traumatic seizures (PTS) are a significant complication from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Adenosine, a major neuroprotective and neuroinhibitory molecule, is important in experimental epilepsy models. Thus, we investigated the adenosine A1 receptor (A1AR) gene and linked it with clinical data extracted for 206 subjects with severe TBI. Tagging SNPs rs3766553, rs903361, rs10920573, rs67017...

The impact of single nucleotide polymorphisms of two loci (C3435T and G2677T/A) of the multidrug resistance-1 gene (MDR1) was investigated in 82 patients undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT). The GG genotype on G2677T/A loci was associated with higher non-relapse mortality than was the non-GG genotype (67% vs. 32%, p=0.0073), but not the C3435T (p=0.2026) or MDR1 haplotype (p=0...

The diversity of lactic acid bacteria associated with Hussuwa fermentation, a Sudanese fermented sorghum food, was studied using a polyphasic taxonomical approach. Predominant strains could be well characterised based on a combination of phenotypic tests and genotypic methods such as ARDRA, rep-PCR and RAPD-PCR, as well as 16S rRNA gene sequencing of representative strains. Thus, the majority (...