Total RNA was extracted from 105 individual postmortem human brain samples representing a range of postmortem conditions. To improve upon parameters currently used to screen for RNA quality, electropherogram patterns generated by the Agilent Bioanalyzer 2100 were compared to the average score in random hexamer-primed reverse transcription real-time PCR for four housekeeping genes in each RNA sa...

Despite the intensity of the search for genes causing inherited retinal degenerations over the past 3 decades, of the approximately 200 disease genes identified to date, all appear to be ordinary housekeeping genes specifying proteins playing basic structural and functional roles in the mature photoreceptor cells. No genes or genetic elements have been identified which can be construed as havin...

Staphylococcus pseudintermedius is an opportunistic pathogen in dogs. Four housekeeping genes with allelic polymorphisms were identified and used to develop an expanded multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme. The new seven-locus technique shows S. pseudintermedius to have greater genetic diversity than previous methods and discriminates more isolates based upon host origin.

BACKGROUND Human brucellosis incidence in China was divided into 3 stages, high incidence (1950-1960s), decline (1970-1980s) and re-emergence (1990-2000s). Human brucellosis has been reported in all the 32 provinces, of which Inner Mongolia has the highest prevalence, accounting for over 40% of the cases in China. To investigate the etiology alteration of human brucellosis in Inner Mongolia, th...

The genus Collimonas consists of facultative, fungus-feeding (mycophagous) bacteria. To date, 3 species (C. fungivorans, C. pratensis and C. arenae) have been described and over 100 strains have been isolated from different habitats. Functional traits of Collimonas bacteria that are potentially involved in interactions with soil fungi mostly negatively (fungal inhibition e.g.), but also positiv...

We performed the first broad study aiming at the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of vibrios by means of multilocus sequence analysis of nine genes. Overall, 14 distinct clades were recognized using the SplitsTree decomposition method. Some of these clades may correspond to families, e.g., the clades Salinivibrio and Photobacteria, while other clades, e.g., Splendidus and Harveyi, cor...

Helicobacter pylori is one of the most genetically diverse of bacterial species, and since the 5'-end of cagA gene and the middle allele of vacA gene of H. pylori from different populations exhibit considerable polymorphisms, these sequence diversities were used to gain insights into the genetic affinities of this gastric pathogen from different populations. Because the genetic affinity of Arab...

Normalization of gene expression data using internal control genes that have biologically stable expression levels is an important process for analyzing reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction data. We propose a three-way linear mixed-effects model to select optimal housekeeping genes. The mixed-effects model can accommodate multiple continuous and/or categorical variables with sample r...

Divergently paired genes (DPGs), also known as bidirectional (head-to-head positioned) genes, are conserved across species and lineages, and thus deemed to be exceptional in genomic organization and functional regulation. Despite previous investigations on the features of their conservation and gene organization, the functional relationship among DPGs in a given species and lineage has not been...