Achievement of appropriate precision is a major challenge for the clinical laboratory, particularly in specialized fields such as enzymology and immunochemistry. Especially in immunochemistry, where accuracy can only poorly be checked because of a lack of reference methods and a multitude of detectable epitopes, precision remains an important index of quality. In immunochemical methods there ar...

11 HASSID and ABRAHAM, Chemical Procedures for Analysis of Polysaccharides, in: Methods of Enzymology, Vol . 3, Academic Press, New York 1957. 12 F. W. FALES, J. biol. Chemistry 193, 113 [1951] . 13 N. NELSON and M. SOMOGYI, as cited in Practical clinical B i o c h e m i s t r y , H . V A R L E Y , 4 t h e d i t i o n , W . HEINEMANN, Medical Book Ltd., London 1967. 14 O. FOLIN and H. Wu, as ci...

This review describes the life of Sir John Cornforth AC CBE FRS, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1975. It covers his early life in Australia, his work in Oxford, the National Institute for Medical Research, the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology and the University of Sussex, together with the contributions made by his wife, Lady Rita Cornforth.

DNA is often subjected to multiple enzymatic treatments during subcloning procedures. For example, converting a restriction site to another by insertion of a synthetic linker requires five or six enzymatic steps: restriction enzyme digestion, treatment with DNA polymerase (if ends are not blunt), phosphorylation of linkers, ligation of linkers to blunt ends, removal of excess linkers by restric...

Mechanical and enzymatic disaggregation procedures have been utilized for the preparation of materials suitable for chromosome examination of tissues from various kinds of solid tumors. A great number of the cells disaggregated with the latter procedure were observed to attach to the bottom of culture flasks after 2 days in vitro; cells obtained with the former method were not attached. In gene...

DNA glycosylases safeguard the genome by locating and excising a diverse array of aberrant nucleobases created from oxidation, alkylation, and deamination of DNA. Since the discovery 28years ago that these enzymes employ a base flipping mechanism to trap their substrates, six different protein architectures have been identified to perform the same basic task. Work over the past several years ha...

In all DNA-DNA in situ hybridization (ISH) procedures described so far in the literature, the production of single-stranded target DNA sequences plays a decisive role. This can be achieved either by enzymatic treatment at physiological temperatures or by the separation of double-stranded DNA sequences. Denaturation by heat and chemical agents (e.g. formamide) is regarded as a prerequisite for t...

We compared Boehringer Mannheim's enzymatic kit for the continuous-flow (AutoAnalyzer II) determination of serum cholesterol with Technicon's N-24a extraction method. Results for patients' samples analyzed by the enzymatic method were higher than those by the comparison method. To evaluate accuracy in the cholesterol determinations, we enrolled the enzymatic method into the Center for Disease C...

In all DNA-DNA in situ hybridization (ISH) procedures described so far in the literature, the production of single-stranded target DNA sequences plays a decisive role. This can be achieved either by enzymatic treatment at physiological temperatures or by the separation of double-stranded DNA sequences. Denaturation by heat and chemical agents (e.g. formamide) is regarded as a prerequisite for t...

In enzymology, as in organic chemistry, many transformations revolve around the chemistry of the carbonyl group. A carbonyl group is electrophilic how can it be made more so? Hydrogens next to a carbonyl group have a reduced pK, how can this reactivity be promoted? Nature has found several ways to address these mechanistic challenges, the most important of which is the use of imines. Studies on...