CONTEXT Throughout the UK a large amount of unwanted, expired or patient returned controlled drugs are disposed of every day, in community and hospital pharmacies, veterinary surgeries, hospices, private hospitals and industrial settings. This is mostly achieved through the use of commercially available controlled drug destruction/denaturing kits, but what do these kits actually do to the drug ...

introduction: helicobacter pylori, as an etiologic cause of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer, should be tested and treated. the true state of infection can only be detected by isolation of gastric biopsies through the invasive method of gastroscopy. however, there are several non-invasive methods for detection of infection, the most common of which is serology. methods: here we have evaluated t...

Short tandem repeat (STR) based DNA typing employing multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique is worldwide familiar for forensic investigations and population genetics study [1-3]. SGM PlusTM and PowerPlex®16 system are two popular multiplexes in forensic community and can amplify concurrently 10 and 15 autosomal STR loci respectively with an additional sex determinant amelogenin loc...

Dengue is the most important arboviral disease transmitted to humans. In our laboratory, we have been working on the standardization of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnosis of this disease. In this work, we compared five commercial kits regularly used on reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) protocols: two Two-Step kits (SuperScript II RT/Super Mix kit and reverse tr...

In recent years, the drive-by malware space has undergone significant consolidation. Today, the most common source of drive-by downloads are the so-called exploit kits. Exploit kits signify a drastic consolidation of the process of malware creation and delivery. Exploit kit authors are often significantly more skillful and better financially motivated than an average “standalone” JavaScript mal...

We evaluated three commercial radioimmunoassay kits (Amersham, Dainabot, Clinical Assays) and two non-commercial methods for determining alpha-fetoprotein in maternal serum during pregnancy. All five procedures were found to be acceptable with respect to practicability, sensitivity, linearity, and precision. Similar results were obtained with Dainabot, Clinical Assays, and the two non-commercia...

The discovery of urinary extracellular biomarkers has been impeded by the lack of efficient methods for the isolation of extracellular vesicles (EVs: exosomes and microvesicles) and extracellular nucleic acid (RNA and DNA) from urine. Ultracentrifugation (UC), considered the gold standard for vesicle isolation from many biofluids, is efficacious but laborious, and, like most commercially availa...

Five commercial Staphylococcus aureus identification kits--Staphaurex (Wellcome), Staphylase (Oxoid), Staphyslide (bioMèrieux), Biostaph (Medlabs) and Bacto Latex (Difco)--were evaluated for the routine identification of S aureus from primary plates in the routine microbiology laboratory. Comparison was made with two methods of tube coagulase testing and five slide methods for detecting clumpin...