Flammulina velutipes is one of the major edible mushrooms in the world. Recently, abnormalities that have a negative impact on crop production have been reported in this mushroom. These symptoms include slow vegetative growth, a compact mycelial mat, and few or even no fruiting bodies. The morphologies and fruiting capabilities of monokaryons of wild-type and degenerate strains that arose throu...

Pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA genes allows for in-depth characterization of complex microbial communities. Although it is known that primer selection can influence the profile of a community generated by sequencing, the extent and severity of this bias on deep-sequencing methodologies is not well elucidated. We tested the hypothesis that the hypervariable region targeted for sequencing and primer ...

Archaea are widespread in extreme and temperate environments, and cultured representatives cover a broad spectrum of metabolic capacities, which sets them up for potentially major roles in the biogeochemistry of their ecosystems. The detection, characterization, and quantification of archaeal functions in mixed communities require Archaea-specific primers or probes for the corresponding metabol...

Reproducible and target-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification relies on several interrelated factors of which primer design is central. Here, we describe new free bioinformatics software, the FastPCR which was developed, and continues to be updated, based on detailed experimental studies of PCR efficiency for the optimal design of primers and probe sequences and for repeat sear...

Genomic fragments of the HN and L genes from Brazilian bovine parainfluenza 3 virus (bPIV-3) isolated as contaminants from cell cultures and clinical specimens were amplified by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), sequenced using specific degenerate primers and analyzed by phylogenetic comparison with reference strains of bPI3V. The Brazilian isolates revealed a high degre...

The sequences of genes encoding the transferrin and lactoferrin receptor proteins from several bacterial species were analyzed for areas of identity in the predicted protein sequences. Degenerate oligonucleotide primers were designed and tested for their ability to amplify portions of the receptor genes. Primer pairs capable of amplifying products of the tbpA/lbpA or tbpB/lbpB genes from all sp...