the combustion of sulfur-rich fossil fuels leads to the release of acid rain-causing sulfurdioxide into the environment. the aim of this study was to enhance the efficiency of biodesulfurizationusing pseudomonas aeruginosa through the duplication of the dsz cluster in this organism. one copy ofthe dsz cluster was inserted by a tri-parental mating method into the chromosome of pseudomonasaerugin...

Fungi that have the enzymes cyanase and carbonic anhydrase show a limited capacity to detoxify cyanate, a fungicide employed by both plants and humans. Here, we describe a novel two-gene cluster that comprises duplicated cyanase and carbonic anhydrase copies, which we name the CCA gene cluster, trace its evolution across Ascomycetes, and examine the evolutionary dynamics of its spread among lin...

introduction: β-globin gene cluster haplotypes are useful in diagnosis of particular molecular defects in β-thalassemia, prenatal diagnosis of β-thalassemia, and elucidating population affinities. methods: β-globin gene cluster haplotypes were studied in 150 β-thalassemia minor and 52 healthy in-dividuals from the fars province of iran. dna was extracted from leukocytes of whole blood by phe-no...

At one end of the 70 kb aflatoxin biosynthetic pathway gene cluster in Aspergillus parasiticus and Aspergillus flavus reported earlier, we have cloned a group of four genes that constitute a well-defined gene cluster related to sugar utilization in A. parasiticus: (1) sugR, (2) hxtA, (3) glcA and (4) nadA. No similar well-defined sugar gene cluster has been reported so far in any other related ...

O antigen is part of the lipopolysaccharide present in the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria and is highly polymorphic. In this study, we obtained sequences of the O-antigen gene clusters for the Yersinia pseudotuberculosis antigens IA, IIA, and IVB. We propose that the IIA gene cluster was derived from the IVB cluster, one of the very few cases in which a parent gene cluster is identifi...

Advances in biological experiments, such as DNA microarrays, have produced large multidimensional data sets for examination and retrospective analysis. Scientists however, heavily rely on existing biomedical knowledge in order to fully analyze and comprehend such datasets. Our proposed framework relies on the Gene Ontology for integrating a priori biomedical knowledge into traditional data anal...

We identify and characterize a gene cluster in El Tor Vibrio cholerae that encodes a cytotoxic activity for HEp-2 cells in vitro. This gene cluster contains four genes and is physically linked to the cholera toxin (CTX) element in the V. cholerae genome. We demonstrate by using insertional mutagenesis that this gene cluster is required for the cytotoxic activity. The toxin, RtxA, resembles memb...

The full-length coat protein gene of Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV) isolates from Iran was characterized byreverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RTPCR) and sequencing. The expected 1515 bp coatprotein (CP) gene amplicon was obtained for 16 isolates out of 89 that were identified by double antibodysandwich enzyme-linked immunesorbent assay (DASELISA) in a population ...

Bacterial genes associated with a single trait are often grouped in a contiguous unit of the genome known as a gene cluster. It is difficult to genetically manipulate many gene clusters because of complex, redundant, and integrated host regulation. We have developed a systematic approach to completely specify the genetics of a gene cluster by rebuilding it from the bottom up using only syntheti...

The psl gene cluster, comprising 15 cotranscribed genes from Pseudomonas aeruginosa, was recently identified as being involved in exopolysaccharide biosynthesis and biofilm formation. In this study, we investigated the regulation of the psl gene cluster and the function of the first gene in this cluster, the pslA gene. PslA shows strong similarities to UDP-glucose lipid carriers. An isogenic ma...