The multimammate rat M. coucha is the most widespread strain to be introduced in biomedical research and various stocks of this strain are maintained in laboratories across the globe. It is an ideal carrier of normally non-human disease to the domestic environment. In order to analyze genetic purity, strains of M. coucha were subjected to PCR-based DNA fingerprinting using sequence tagged micro...

We aligned 21,504 publicly available Illumina-sequenced human RNA-seq samples from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) to the human genome and compared detected exon-exon junctions with junctions in several recent gene annotations. 56,865 junctions (18.6%) found in at least 1,000 samples were not annotated, and their expression associated with tissue type. Newer samples contributed few novel well-s...

Asian wild rice (Oryza rufipogon) that ranges widely across the eastern and southern part of Asia is recognized as the direct ancestor of cultivated Asian rice (O. sativa). Studies of the geographic structure of O. rufipogon, based on chloroplast and low-copy nuclear markers, reveal a possible phylogeographic signal of subdivision in O. rufipogon. However, this signal of geographic differentiat...

We have cloned and sequenced the flagellin gene from Borrelia miyamotoi strain HT31 and compared it with previously published flagellin sequences. Sequence similarity analysis demonstrated that strain HT31 is phylogenetically distant from the three species of Lyme disease borreliae is deeply branched into the relapsing fever borrelia cluster. The result was in full agreement with the classifica...

A general mapping strategy is described in which the 3'untranslated regions of human cDNAs are used to design PCR primers which will selectively amplify human genomic sequences in a rodent background. When applied to panels of human x hamster somatic cell hybrid DNAs, this approach provides a PCR-based method for rapidly assigning genes to specific chromosomes and chromosomal regions. In additi...

Stem rust has become a renewed threat to global wheat production after the emergence and spread of race TTKSK (also known as Ug99) and related races from Africa. To elucidate U.S. winter wheat resistance genes to stem rust, association mapping was conducted using a panel of 137 lines from cooperative U.S. winter wheat nurseries from 2008 and simple sequence repeat (SSR) and sequence tagged site...

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is an in vitro methocl for selectively amplifying, or synthesizing millions of copies of, a short region of a DNA molecule. The reaction is carried out enzymatically in a test tube and has been successfully applied to regions as small as 100 base pairs and as large as 6000 base pairs. In contrast, DNA cloning is a nonselective in vivo method for replicating D...

Originally discovered in the bacteriophage Mu DNA inversion system gin, Fis (Factor for Inversion Stimulation) regulates many genetic systems. To determine the base frequency conservation required for Fis to locate its binding sites, we collected a set of 60 experimentally defined wild-type Fis DNA binding sequences. The sequence logo for Fis binding sites showed the significance and likely kin...