Evaluation of gene expression in urinary sediment has been considered as a promising non-invasive approach for biomarker identification of kidney diseases. Nonetheless, there are several challenges in extraction of RNA from this valuable source of biomarkers, mostly because of the factors that have influence on quality of isolated RNA such as low cellular content. Accordingly, we compared the q...

Although it is generally accepted that the spread of a response time (RT) distribution increases with the mean, the precise nature of this relation remains relatively unexplored. The authors show that in several descriptive RT distributions, the standard deviation increases linearly with the mean. Results from a wide range of tasks from different experimental paradigms support a linear relation...

Recently developed PCR-based reverse transcriptase (RT) assays are useful in the detection of retroviruses since they are approximately a millionfold more sensitive than conventional RT assays. However, these assays are both labor- and time-intensive. The previously described product-enhanced reverse transcriptase (PERT) assay involves a two-step RT-PCR followed by detection and quantitation of...