微生物学技术

Some strains of Bacillus cereus and Staphylococcus aureus produce toxins that cause food poisoning. Bacterial toxins can be detected using tissue culture assays or biochemical techniques; however, these methods are expensive and may be slow to give a result. Commercial immunoassay ki ...

Noroviruses (NVs) are a genus belonging to the virus family Caliciviridae and are transmitted by the fecal-oral and the aerosol routes. NVs are the most common cause of nonbacterial gastroenteritis, accounting for two-thirds of all illnesses caused by known food-borne pathogens and for mo ...

Enteroviruses are members of the Picornaviridae family and represent one of the most important water-transmitted pathogens. Detection of enteroviruses in water sources, or water-contaminated food, is a very valuable tool not only to prevent waterborne diseases but also to track down ...

Viral food-borne illnesses have become very common in humans worldwide. Three viruses—noroviruses, rotavirus, and hepatitis A virus (HAV)—are implicated frequently in food-borne illness and have been ranked among the top 10 causes of food-borne disease over the past 10 years. The most com ...

The major antigens secreted by the parasite Fasciola hepatica are cathepsin-L cysteine proteases. These enzymes can be isolated from the parasite excretory-secretory products in sufficient quantities for use as an antigen for the serodiagnosis of human fasciolosis. The methods il ...

Techniques based on nucleic acid amplification have proven to be essential for the detection and epidemiological tracking of members of the genus Cryptosporidium. This gastrointestinal protozoan parasite cannot be routinely cultivated and it has an extremely low infectious do ...

Fish-borne and meat-borne parasitic infections represent an important public health concern, given the increasing risk of acquiring these pathogens and related allergies through the consumption of raw or undercooked seafood and meat. This can, in part, be attributed to the increased g ...

Risk assessment has become increasingly important as a tool in assessing risks from food-borne pathogens. There are many methodologies that may be used when constructing a risk assessment model, and there are many methodological issues, which are left to the risk assessor’s choice. A number of ...

Food-borne diseases include infections caused by bacteria, parasites, and viruses. Each year, millions of persons experience food-borne illness, although only a fraction seek medical care, and an even smaller number submit laboratory specimens. To monitor the impact of these food-bo ...

Although light microscopy fell out of favor as a research tool in prokaryotic biology in the 1980s, advances in the reagents available for cell labeling (staining) and in the user-friendliness of microscopes were underpinning a revolution in eukaryotic cell biology. The development of ep ...

Over the past few decades major improvements have been made in the treatment of cancer patients. Despite the success obtained with several new classes of drugs, resistance of cancer cells still remains a major hurdle to cure patients (1). Multidrug resistance (MDR) is one of the best characteriz ...

Bladder cancer is the fifth most common malignancy, demonstrated by the approx 52,900 patients that will be diagnosed in the United States in 1996 (1). Around 15–20% of these patients will be characterized by muscle invasion or node posmve disease The standard therapy for muscle invasive disease ...

Malignant melanoma is an increasingly important clinical problem in the United States, because the incidence of cutaneous malignant melanoma has been increasing significantly in recent years (1,2) Despite the use of cancer chemotherapy and immunotherapy for treatment against t ...

Current advances in the understanding of the genetic mechanisms of carcinogenesis and manipulation of gene expression have introduced gene therapy as a new strategy for cancer therapeutics. Recently, gene modulation using specific oligonucleotides have been developed and def ...

Our laboratory has investigated the cleavage activity of an-anti-c-erb-B-2 ribozyme. The c-erb-B-2 proto-oncogene (also called HER-2/neu) encodes a 185 kDa transmembrane tyrosine kinase-type receptor that is homologous with the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) (1,2) The pu ...

Mutations in the K-ras oncogene and mutations or deletions in the tumor suppressor gene p53 are the two most prevalent oncogenetic alterations in human lung cancer. Ras mutations occur primarily in lung adenocarcinomas and small numbers of large cell undifferentiated and squamous cell l ...

The undisputed success of detection assays based on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has been largely due to its rapidity in comparison to many conventional diagnostic methods. For instance, detection and identification of mycobacteria, chlamydiae, mycoplasmas, brucellae, a ...

Diagnostic polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is an extremely powerful rapid method for diagnosis of microbial infections and genetic diseases, as well as for detecting microorganisms in environmental and food samples. However, the usefulness of diagnostic PCR is limited, in part, by the p ...

Food-borne zoonotic bacteria, transferred from animals to food products, are a major concern in modern food production and, consequently, for human health (1). Accordingly, there is a need to control the entire food chain, from infections at the herd level to the consumer, through screening and c ...

Among molecular biological methods targeting nucleic acids, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has become the most popular diagnostic method in human and veterinary medicine, as well as in microbiological food testing (1,2).