The predatory beetle Dastarcus helophoroides (Fairmaire) (Coleoptera: Bothrideridae) is a natural enemy of many longhorned beetles and is mainly distributed in both China and Japan. To date, no research on D. helophoroides P450 enzymes has been reported. In our study, for the better understanding of P450 enzymes in D. helophoroides, 100 novel cDNA fragments encoding cytochrome P450 were amplifi...

PCR fragments and linear vectors containing overlapping ends are easily assembled into a propagative plasmid by homologous recombination in Escherichia coli. Although this gap-repair cloning approach is straightforward, its existence is virtually unknown to most molecular biologists. To popularize this method, we tested critical parameters influencing the efficiency of PCR fragments cloning int...

Porcine gene-specifi c primers design Four alternatively spliced transcript variants of TRIM55 have been identifi ed in human. The longest human TRIM55 cDNA (transcript variant 2, GenBank accession number: NM_033058) was used to search in the ‘EST_other’ database with the standard BLAST (http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/blast/) algorithm for homologous pig expressed sequence tags (ESTs). The ESTs s...

Avoiding complementarity between primers when designing a PCR assay constitutes a central rule strongly anchored in the mind of the molecular scientist. 3'-complementarity will extend the primers during PCR elongation using one another as template, consequently disabling further possible involvement in traditional target amplification. However, a 5'-complementarity will leave the primers unchan...

BACKGROUND The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is commonly used to detect the presence of nucleic acid sequences both in research and diagnostic settings. While high specificity is often achieved, biological requirements sometimes necessitate that primers are placed in suboptimal locations which lead to problems with the formation of primer dimers and/or misamplification of homologous sequences...

BACKGROUND Splicing by overlap extension (SOE) PCR is used to create mutation in the coding sequence of an enzyme in order to study the role of specific residues in protein's structure and function. OBJECTIVES We introduced a nested-SOE-PCR (N -SOE-PCR) in order to increase the specificity and generating mutations in a gene by SOE-PCR. MATERIALS AND METHODS Genomic DNA from Bacillus thermoc...