BACKGROUND Gitelman syndrome (GS), an inherited autosomal recessive salt-losing renal tubulopathy caused by mutations in SLC12A3 gene, has been associated with normal prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) levels since 1995 by a study involving 11 clinically diagnosed patients. However, it is difficult to explain why cyclooxygenase-2 (COX2) inhibitors, which pharmacologically reduce PGE2 synthesis, are helpfu...

Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) can induce post-transcriptional gene silencing in a wide variety of organisms. Commonly, inverted repeats are used to produce dsRNA to silence genes of interest. However, cloning inverted repeats still remains a rate-limiting step for widely applying this technique. Here we describe a pGEM-T-based vector, pGEM-WIZ, designed to produce inverted repeats for any Drosoph...

In an earlier single-dose escalation study to evaluate the safety and pharmacokinetics of orally administered des-aspartate-angiotensin I (DAA-I) in healthy subjects, the plasma level of DAA-I could not be determined because DAA-I is rapidly degraded in the circulation. The present study investigated the oral bioavailability of DAA-I by measuring the prostaglandin E2 metabolite (PGEM) in the pl...

Pfu DNA Polymerase(a)-generated blunt-end PCR fragments can be ligated into the pGEM®-T and pGEM®-T Easy Vectors(b,c) if the fragments are first A-tailed using Taq DNA Polymerase(a). We describe a method for A-tailing these PCR fragments and demonstrate its utility by cloning two different Pfu DNA Polymerase-generated fragments into the pGEM®-T Easy Vector, using the new 2X Rapid Ligation Buffe...

Motivation Climate change plays an important role in the generation and maintenance of biodiversity by driving processes such as diversification range shifts. As a result, patterns are often found to carry imprints palaeoclimatic changes. However, we still know little about spatial temporal variation climate over scale millennia affecting eco-evolutionary dynamics, mostly because scarcity user-...

We have recovered infectious Sendai virus (SeV) from full-length cDNA (FL-3) by transfecting this cDNA and pGEM plasmids expressing the nucleocapsid protein (NP), phosphoprotein and large proteins into cells infected with a vaccinia virus which expresses T7 RNA polymerase. These cells were then injected into chicken eggs, in which SeV grows to very high titers. FL-3 was marked with a BglII site...

Multifunctional HAX-1 protein is involved in the regulation of several key processes like calcium homeostasis, apoptosis, and cell migration. Clarification of its role in these or other processes and its molecular mechanisms of function remains to be established. Mekkawy et al. [1] report HAX-1 influence on cell proliferation,migration, adhesion, and invasion induced by the urokinase-type plasm...