PURPOSE Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most common and serious form of an inherited blood disorder that lead to higher risk of early mortality. SCD patients are at high risk for developing multiorgan acute and chronic complications linked with significant morbidity and mortality. Some of the ophthalmological complications of SCD include retinal changes, refractive errors, vitreous hemorrhage,...

Repetitive DNA motifs with potential variable-number tandem repeats (VNTR) were identified in the genome of Neisseria meningitidis and used to develop a typing method. A total of 146 meningococcal isolates recovered from carriers and patients were studied. These included 82 of the 107 N. meningitidis isolates previously used in the development of multilocus sequence typing (MLST), 45 isolates r...

An evaluation of the utility of rep PCR typing compared to the 15 loci discriminatory set of MIRU-VNTR was undertaken. Twenty-nine isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from patients were examined. Genomic DNA was extracted from the isolates by standard method. The number of copies of tandem repeats of the 15 MIRU-VNTR loci was determined by PCR amplification and agarose gel electrophoresis of...

BACKGROUND Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis is a powerful strategy for large-scale molecular population studies examining phylogenetic relationships among bacterial strains. Mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeats (MIRU-VNTR) can be easily digitized to share data among laboratories. This study applied SNP and MIRU-VNTR analyses for molecular st...

background: cytokines are cell signaling molecules which upon release by cells facilitate the recruitment of immune-modulatory cells towards the sites of inflammation. genetic variations in cytokine genes are shown to regulate their production and affect the risk of infectious as well as autoimmune diseases. intron-3 of interleukin-4 gene (il-4) harbors 70-bp variable number of tandem repeats (...

Ku80 is a subunit of the Ku heterodimer that binds to DNA double-strand break ends as part of the non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway. Ku80 is also involved in homologous recombination (HR) via its interaction with BRCA1. Ku80 is encoded by the XRCC5 gene that contains a variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) insertion in its promoter region. Different VNTR genotypes can alter XRCC5 express...

Mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number tandem repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex isolates is portable, 100% reproducible, and highly discriminatory. Nondenaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (non-dHPLC) with use of a WAVE microbial analysis system is a promising method of PCR amplicon analysis as it is low cost and requires no preanaly...