MI agar and Colilert(®), as well as mFC agar combined with an Escherichia coli-specific molecular assay (mFC + E. coli rtPCR), were compared in terms of their sensitivity, ease of use, time to result and affordability. The three methods yielded a positive E. coli signal for 11.5, 10.8, and 11.5% of the 968 well water samples tested, respectively. One hundred and thirty-six (136) samples gave bl...

Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) infection causes a chronic granulomatous inflammatory regional enteritis in ruminants. Cell-mediated immune responses are assumed to be protective and therefore, to be associated with its more delimited lesion types, while humoral responses are mainly associated with diffuse histopathological lesions. However, this duality of immune responses ha...

Purpose: Several assays are used to diagnose HCV infected patients, but measurement of HCV RNA levels has become an integral and increasingly important part of the management of patients with HCV infection to select the appropriate treatment schedule and to estimate the treatment outcome. Real Time PCR test allows for detection of PCR amplification products during the early phase of the reactio...

Objectives: The aim of this report was to investigate the genotypes of HCV in patients on regular hemodialysis in Iraq Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted to investigate the genotypes of HCV in patients on regular hemodialysis in 7 centers across Iraq. 255 subjects with positive anti-HCV antibodies were recruited in this study. Results: To confirm the positivity, RTPCR was performe...

The "quantitative" ChIP, a tool commonly used to study protein-DNA interactions in cells and tissue, is a difficult assay often plagued with technical error. We present, herein, the process required to merge multiple protocols into a quick, reliable and easy method and an approach to accurately quantify ChIP DNA prior to performing PCR. We demonstrate that high intensity sonication for at least...

In order to improve the diagnosis of enzootic pneumonia (EP) in pigs two real-time polymerase chain reaction (rtPCR) assays for the detection of Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae in bronchial swabs from lung necropsies were established and validated in parallel. As a gold standard, the current "mosaic diagnosis" was taken, including epidemiological tracing, clinical signs, macro- and histopathological l...

 An adaptive input-output linearization method for general nonlinear systems is developed without using states of the system. Another key feature of this structure is the fact that, it does not need model of the system. In this scheme, neurolinearizer has few weights, so it is practical in adaptive situations.  Online training of neuroline...