BACKGROUND Bovine tuberculosis has led to serious economic losses for Sika Deer producers in China. Strategies for controlling the spread of Mycobacterium bovis are often hampered by a lack of epidemiological data. Specifically, tracing infections requires the ability to trace back infections, which, in turn, requires the ability to determine isolates with a common source. This study was planne...

We have identified conserved autoantigenic cellular proteins that bind to G-rich sequence motifs in recombinogenic regions of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA. This binding activity, called TRBP, recognizes the EBV terminal repeats, a locus responsible for interconversion of linear and circular EBV DNA. We found that TRBP also binds to EBV DNA sequences involved in deletion of EBNA2, a gene product...

OBJECTIVE The dopaminergic system is associated with feelings of pleasure and reward and with positive hedonic processes related to food, sexual activity and certain substances. Because it is recognized that patients who have eating disorders with binge-eating behaviour have a high comorbidity of substance dependence, we examined the association between the variable number of tandem repeats (VN...

Genetic association studies investigating the association between genes of serotonergic and dopaminergic systems and behavioral and psychological symptoms in dementia (BPSD) are contradictory. We have utilized 1008 probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients from the UK and used the 12-item Neuropsychiatric Inventory. We applied a multiple indicators-multiple causes (MIMIC) approach to investiga...

Citrus greening (Huanglongbing, HLB) is one of the most destructive diseases of citrus worldwide. In South Asia HLB has been known for more than a century, while in Americas the disease was found relatively recently. HLB is associated with three species of 'Candidatus Liberibacter' among which 'Ca. Liberibacter asiaticus' (CLas) has most wide distribution. Recently, a number of studies identifi...

The etiopathological relationship between latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA) and classical type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes remains unclear. Variation at the insulin gene variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) minisatellite influences susceptibility to type 1 diabetes, but studies in LADA have been small and inconsistent. We examined the role of insulin gene variation (using flank...

Introduction: Some segments of the human genome exhibit polymorphism due to a variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR). The enzymatic amplification of VNTR loci can allow for rapid analysis and discrimination of closely sized alleles. We report a PCR-based method for analysis of the highly polymorphic Stl4 VNTR. Source and Description: The Stl4-1 probe is a 3 kb EcoRI fragment cloned from human...

We analyzed a set of variable-number tandem-repeat (VNTR) loci to assess their nucleotide sequence diversity in isolates of three Mycobacterium ulcerans genotypes. Sequence variants in two loci resulted in intraspecies resolution of Southeast Asian and Asian genotypes in contrast to a homogenous sequence composition among African isolates. Nucleotide sequence polymorphism in repeat units can en...

he predisposition to type 2 diabetes is programmed early in life and genotypes promoting survival during nutritional adversity could increase the risk of type 2 diabetes. The insulin gene and variation in the insulin gene variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) polymorphism has been suggested to modify birth size and diabetes susceptibility. Materials and Methods: We assessed the association b...