Streptococcus equi is the etiologic agent of a highly infectious upper respiratory disease of horses known as strangles. Bacterial culture methods and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of nasopharyngeal washes and guttural pouch lavages are used routinely to test clinical and carrier animals for the presence of S. equi but no definitive or gold standard test method has been shown to be optimal. W...

The major reason for prenatal diagnosis lies in the detection of trisomies, particularly trisomy 21 (Down's syndrome). Current techniques require lengthy laboratory procedures and high costs. Furthermore, diagnosis is often not possible if the sample is of small size or is contaminated. An alternative method, quantitative fluorescent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) of short tandem repeats (STRs...

BACKGROUND Bacterial culture and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays for the detection of Streptococcus equi in nasopharyngeal washes (NPW) and guttural pouch lavage (GPL) samples have low sensitivity. In human diagnostics, processing of samples with flocked swabs has improved recovery rates of bacterial agents because of improved surface area and elution factors. HYPOTHESIS For S. equi su...

X-linked diseases, this requires the equimolar mixing of PCR products between a wild-type DNA sample and the sample to be tested. (c) The type of mutations searched for must be detectable by D-HPLC. D-HPLC is more sensitive in the screening of point mutations, which is the case of most FIX mutations (1 ). In any case, once the D-HPLC conditions have been defined, a prospective study of a novel ...

The use of rapid-cycle PCR combined with colorimetric microwell hybridization for detecting Bordetella pertussis was investigated. Rapid cycling was performed with an air thermocycler (model 1605; Idaho Technology, Idaho Falls, Idaho). Although the instrument was originally designed to be used with capillary tubes, an adapter that allows this instrument to be used with PCR tubes has recently be...

The dynamics of emerging nucleoside and nucleotide reverse-transcriptase inhibitor (NRTI) resistance in hepatitis B virus (HBV) are not well understood because standard dideoxynucleotide direct polymerase chain reaction (PCR) sequencing assays detect drugresistance mutations only after they have become dominant. To obtain insight into NRTI resistance, we used a new sequencing technology to char...

Staphylococcus aureus is an important food-borne pathogen of humans due to ingestion of food containing enterotoxigenic strains. We evaluated the detection of S. aureus enterotoxin A gene (sea) using a loop-mediated isothermal DNA amplification (LAMP) method. Specificity of LAMP method was comparable to that of conventional PCR. Both methods correctly identified sea and did not detect 14 other ...

The possible role of enteroviral persistence in the etiology of the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) was investigated by serological testing, VP-1 antigen testing, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis of stool specimens as well as by viral cultures of stool--both direct and after acid treatment. No differences between 76 patients with disabling unexplained fatigue and 76 matched controls ...