Existing estimates of the incidence of infectious intestinal disease (IID) caused by norovirus are based on electron microscopy or reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Neither method accurately represents norovirus disease burden: Electron microscopy has poor diagnostic sensitivity, and RT-PCR has poor diagnostic specificity. In this study, viral load measurements were used...

Background. Alterations in TGF-beta signaling are common in head and neck cancer (HNSCC). Mutations in TGF-beta type II receptor (TbetaR-II) occur frequently in HNSCC while TGF-beta type I receptor (TbetaR-I) mutations are rare, suggesting that other molecular alterations in the TGF-beta pathway are likely. To identify abnormalities in TbetaR-I expression we analyzed 50 HNSCCs and correlated th...

In this study, the association between telomerase activity and the expression of the human telomerase subunits human telomerase RNA (hTR) and human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) in paired neoplastic and normal renal tissue samples was investigated. Reverse transcription (RT)-PCR on 20 tumor nephrectomy samples revealed that hTR was constitutively expressed both in cancer and normal t...

We have previously demonstrated that cytochrome P450 aromatase (P450arom) protein, an estrogen-synthesizing enzyme, is present and active in germ cells of the adult mouse testis. To establish that P450arom mRNA is expressed in germ cells of other species, we examined expression of P450arom in adult rat germ cells by employing reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Total RNA w...

BACKGROUND Overexpression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is associated with increased angiogenesis, growth and invasion in solid tumors, and hematologic malignancies. The expression of isoforms of VEGF, which mediate different effects, can be discriminated by splice-variant-specific quantitative reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR), but current methods have only modest sensitivity a...

UNLABELLED PREMISE OF THE STUDY To study gene expression in plants, high-quality RNA must be extracted in quantities sufficient for subsequent cDNA library construction. Field-based collections are often limited in quantity and quality of tissue and are typically preserved in RNAlater. Obtaining sufficient and high-quality yield from variously preserved samples is essential to studies of com...

The two hemolysin gene clusters previously identified in Vibrio anguillarum, the vah1 cluster and the rtxACHBDE cluster, are responsible for the hemolytic and cytotoxic activities of V. anguillarum in fish. In this study, we used degenerate PCR to identify a positive hemolysin regulatory gene, hlyU, from the unsequenced V. anguillarum genome. The hlyU gene of V. anguillarum encodes a 92-amino-a...

Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) have been identified as important morphogens with pleiotropic functions in regulating the development, homeostasis and repair of various tissues. The aim of this study was to characterize the expression of BMPs in synovial tissues under normal and arthritic conditions. Synovial tissue from normal donors (ND) and from patients with osteoarthritis (OA) and rheum...

We have prospectively analyzed blood samples of 122 patients with breast disease for the presence of circulating expressing MUC1 cells before and after treatment. Among them, 28 patients had histologically confirmed benign breast disease (group 1), 34 patients had operable breast cancer (group 2), and 60 patients had advanced breast cancer (group 3). Circulating epithelial cells were isolated w...

PURPOSE The tumor-associated antigen PRAME, a potential candidate for immunotherapeutic targeting, is frequently expressed in a variety of cancers. However, no information about its presence in neuroblastoma is available to date. We therefore evaluated and quantified PRAME expression in a considerable number of neuroblastoma tumors and assessed its impact on the outcome of patients. EXPERIMEN...