Infertility in cattle is a major concern of farmers worldwide and despite the enormous improvements in assisted reproduction technologies, the success rates of pregnancies are still low. Embryonic loss is considered one of the main factors of infertility in cattle. As such, the identification of genetic markers for embryo quality and development can help elucidate the molecular mechanisms invol...

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is widely used to uncover new information about genes and genomes, but is limited in that it is highly dependent on the use of specific and sensitive primers to yield good results. Primers can target a specific, known sequence, but what is often more interesting is the use of degenerate primers to target unknown sequences. Degenerate primers are designed base...

Actin-crosslinking proteins link F-actin into the bundles and networks that constitute the cytoskeleton. Dystrophin, beta-spectrin, alpha-actinin, ABP-120, ABP-280, and fimbrin share homologous actin-binding domains and comprise an actin crosslinker superfamily. We have identified a novel member of this superfamily (ACF7) using a degenerate primer-mediated PCR strategy that was optimized to res...

The oleaginous bacterium Rhodococus opacus strain PD630 serves as a model organism to investigate the metabolism of storage triacylglycerols (TAGs) in bacteria. The key enzyme catalysing the last step of TAG biosynthesis in bacteria is a promiscuous acyltransferase (Atf), exhibiting acyl-CoA acyltransferase activity to both diacylglycerols (DGAT activity) and fatty alcohols (wax ester synthase,...

RAD-tag is a powerful tool for high-throughput genotyping. It relies on PCR amplification of the starting material, following enzymatic digestion and sequencing adaptor ligation. Amplification introduces duplicate reads into the data, which arise from the same template molecule and are statistically nonindependent, potentially introducing errors into genotype calling. In shotgun sequencing, dat...

Polynomial vector fields which admit a prescribed Darboux integrating factor are quite well-understood when the geometry of the underlying curve is nondegenerate. In the general setting morphisms of the affine plane may remove degeneracies of the curve, and thus allow more structural insight. In the present paper we establish some properties of integrating factors subjected to morphisms, and we...