OBJECTIVE To estimate the rate of seroconversion to positivity for hepatitis C antibody in repeat blood donors in England and to describe the probable routes of infection in these donors. DESIGN Retrospective survey of blood donors becoming positive for hepatitis C antibody and of the results of donation testing. SETTING The 14 blood centres in England. SUBJECTS All repeat donors giving b...

Unnecessary repeat requesting of tests can make up a large proportion of a laboratory's workload. This audit set out to establish the size of this problem and to identify the circumstances under which these repeat requests were made in a government tertiary hospital immunology laboratory. The numbers of tests for immunoglobulin measurement, common autoantibodies, and tumour markers that were re...

Trinucleotide repeat disorders are a heterogeneous group of diseases caused by the expansion, beyond a pathogenic threshold, of unstable DNA tracts in different genes. Sequence interruptions in the repeats have been described in the majority of these disorders and may influence disease phenotype and heritability. Spinal bulbar muscular atrophy (SBMA) is a motor neuron disease caused by a CAG tr...

background: expansion of gaa trinucleotide repeats is the molecular basis of friedreich’s ataxia (frda). precise detection of the gaa expansion repeat in frataxin gene has always been a challenge. different molecular methods have been suggested for detection of gaa expansion, including; short-pcr, long-pcr, triplet repeat primed-pcr (tp-pcr) and southern blotting. the aim of study was to evalua...

The pathological aggregation of tau into paired helical filaments is a hallmark of several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease. We have generated cell models of tau aggregation in order to study mechanisms involving abnormal changes of tau. In the cell models the repeat domain of tau (tau(RD)) and some of its variants are expressed in a regulated fashion, e.g. the 4-repeat...

In this study, we characterize a panel of 20 microsatellite markers that reproducibly amplify in Azara's owl monkeys (Aotus azarai) for use in genetic profiling analyses. A total of 128 individuals from our study site in Formosa, Argentina, were genotyped for 20 markers, 13 of which were found to be polymorphic. The levels of allelic variation at these loci provided paternity exclusion probabil...

Allele frequencies for 15 short tandem repeat (STR) loci (D8S1179, D21S11, D7S820, CSF1PO, D3S1358, TH01, D13S317, D16S539, D2S1338, D19S433, vWA, TPOX, D18S51, D5S818, and FGA) were obtained from 7,636 unrelated individuals of Chinese Han population living in Qinghai and Chongqing, China. Totally 206 alleles were observed, with the corresponding allele frequencies ranging from 0.0001-0.4982. C...

In 2009, the Cytopathology Education and Technology Consortium issued a statement on human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA test utilization that was published in multiple journals. 1 This statement was a concise summary of the clinical indications for high-risk or oncogenic HPV testing based on guidelines from the American Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology (ASCCP) and the American Cancer S...

Y-short tandem repeats (STRs) are located in the nonrecombining part of the Y-chromosome. Its genetic characteristics are helpful to paternity testing. The male lineage can be pursued over several generations. Since an overwhelming majority of rape or sexual assault cases involve male suspects, these markers proved to be very useful with mixed stains. Routine casework performed in our laborator...

BACKGROUND In 5 percent of paternity determination cases, only DNA samples from the alleged father and child pairs are tested. The absence of the mother's DNA increases the probability of false paternity inclusions, which affects laboratories that use a limited number of DNA markers. The effect of coincidental matches between unrelated individuals on DNA tests of motherless cases was determined...