The lesion-specific DNA polymerase POLH gene is mutated in xeroderma pigmentosum variant (XP-V) patients who exhibit an increased skin cancer incidence from UV exposure. Normal cells in which POLH expression was reduced using short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) were compared with the XP-V cellular phenotype that results from naturally occurring inactivating mutations. Stable clones expressing siRNA...

Extreme Requirements (XR) is a proposal that tries to improve the quality of Extreme Programming (XP). XP is a well known agile method for software production. XP key elements are: little documentation, simplicity, analysis as constant activity, evolutionary design, integration and daily test. XR defines a requirements strategy that can be coupled with XP. In this article, we present an XR busi...

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) [5] is a paradigm that enables clean modularization of crosscutting concerns. AOP facilitates extensible architectures without requiring major refactoring of code. This paper presents a theoretical study about the influence of AOP on eXtreme Programming (XP) [3]. The paper analyzes the effect of AOP on the XP programming principles, values, and practices, and w...

Nine Aspergillus niger isolates differing in virulence were assayed for polygalacturonase (PG) content and isoenzyme pattern in spores, liquid cultures and inoculated onion seeds of cultivar ‘Bianca Agostana’. The isolates differed in PG production quantitatively and in terms of isoenzyme pattern. Isolates An1 and An5, characterised by low PG production in liquid culture and low virulence, lack...

A new cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) subgroup based on recent sequence data has been proposed by Palukaitis and Zaitlin (1997) to distinguish between some strains in the former subgroup I. The three subgroups are tentatively named IA, IB and II. Here we describe a simple and rapid procedure based on the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RTPCR) followed by enzymatic digestion (RFLP) ...

Serum syndecan-1 was investigated in 189 patients with newly diagnosed monoclonal proteinaemia (MM (66), MGUS (54), provisional MGUS (no bone marrow examination performed; 69)) and 36 controls. Syndecan-1 levels ranged widely between all diagnostic categories and were of limited discriminatory value (sensitivity 68%, specificity 78%) in newly diagnosed monoclonal proteinaemia. 48 Schaar-03 XP 2...

Diabetic eye damage may start in bone marrow, suggest Busik and colleagues. Damaged bone marrow nerves and disrupted circadian genes hampered the release of progenitor cells that are required to repair diabetes-induced vessel injury in the eye. Up to 45% of diabetic adults in the US develop retinopathy, a potentially blinding condition. Although high glucose levels and oxidative stress may caus...

Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) is an autosomal recessive human disease, characterized by an extreme sensitivity to sunlight, caused by the inability of cells to repair UV light-induced damage to DNA. Cell fusion was used to transfer fragments of Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) chromosomes into XP cells. The hybrid cells exhibited UV resistance and DNA repair characteristics comparable to those expresse...

Xeroderma pigmentosum (XP) and trichothiodystrophy (TTD) are rare genodermatoses transmitted as recessive and autosomal traits that result in reduced capacity to repair UV-induced DNA lesions. Although XP, but not TTD, patients are prone to basal and squamous cell carcinomas, to date no comparative studies of the XP and TTD phenotypes have included epidermal keratinocytes. We compared the DNA r...

Xeroderma pigmentosum Variant (XP-V) form is characterized by a late onset of skin symptoms. Our aim is the clinical and genetic investigations of XP-V Tunisian patients in order to develop a simple tool for early diagnosis. We investigated 16 suspected XP patients belonging to ten consanguineous families. Analysis of the POLH gene was performed by linkage analysis, long range PCR, and sequenci...