The Scientific Committee reviewed the current state-of-the-science on genotoxicity testing and provided a commentary and recommendations on genotoxicity testing strategies. A step-wise approach is recommended for the generation and evaluation of data on genotoxic potential, beginning with a basic battery of in vitro tests, comprising a bacterial reverse mutation assay and an in vitro micronucle...

A reverse passive hemagglutination test that utilizes human erythrocytes coated with antibody to gonococci was developed to distinguish differences among 11 strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Different rabbits were immunized with each strain of gonococcus. Antibody was purified by passing antiserum over an immunoadsorbent column containing homologous cell walls trapped in a cross-linked polyacry...

Advances in genomics and innovative strategies such as reverse vaccinology have changed the concepts and approaches to vaccine candidate selection and design. Genome mining and blind selection of novel antigens provide a novel route to investigate the mechanisms that underpin pathogenesis. The resulting lists of novel candidates are revealing new aspects of pathogenesis of target organisms, whi...

Bacterial genetics differs from the genetics of higher organisms chiefly because of lack of information about the mechanism of orderly transmission of characters from generation to generation, owing to the absence of well-established processes of conjugation and to the infant state of bacterial cytol0,~. Our only way of approach is the study of bacterial mutability, for which the field of bacte...

Much less is known about reverse transcriptases (RTs) in prokaryotes than in eukaryotes, with most prokaryotic enzymes still uncharacterized. Two surveys involving BLAST searches for RT genes in prokaryotic genomes revealed the presence of large numbers of diverse, uncharacterized RTs and RT-like sequences. Here, using consistent annotation across all sequenced bacterial species from GenBank an...

Proliferating cells are often presumed to be more mutable than quiescent cells because they have less time to repair DNA damage before DNA replication. Direct tests of this hypothesis have been confounded by the need for cell division before a mutation can be detected. We have avoided this problem by showing that the Big Blue mouse cell line permits the dynamic quantification of both lesions an...