微生物学技术

In recent years, numerous contamination outbreaks, involving various pathogens (i.e., Listeria and Salmonella), have increased concern over food preservation. Research efforts have focused on the discovery of new molecules targeting such foodborne pathogens and therefore ab ...

Cyanobacteria are ubiquitous in the freshwater environment. Their success as a group in a wide range of aquatic habitats has been attributed to their unique physiological characteristics and their high adaptive ability over a wide range of environmental conditions. They are capable of r ...

Recent outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis caused by Cryptosporidium parvum in the United States and other countries (1,2), as well as the emergence of cryptosporidiosis as a frequent cause of morbidity and mortality in immunodeficient individuals (3), have raised the interest of the rese ...

Consumption of contaminated water has been implicated as a major source of Cryptosporidium infection in various outbreak investigations and case control studies. Surveys conducted in various regions of the United States demonstrated the presence of Cryptosporidium oocysts in ...

Bacterial virulence factors such as toxins are often encoded by bacteriophages. Among other examples, factors encoded by phages have been described in some of the emerging or re-emerging pathogens, including the pyrogenic exotoxin A production in group A streptococci (1), the cholera to ...

Antimicrobial resistance determinants may be transferred among bacteria via mobile genetic elements including plasmids, transposons, and the more recently explored integrons (1). Integrons are naturally occurring genetic elements found as part of the Tn21 transposon family ...

Rapid, accurate, and sensitive determination of antibiotic resistance profiles of various human and animal pathogens becomes a vital prerequisite for successful therapeutic intervention in the face of the increased occurrences of drug-resistant bacterial infections. The c ...

For mutagenesis of BAC-cloned herpesvirus genomes, we have adapted a two-step replacement procedure originally described by O’Connor et al. (1) for the manipulation of large DNA segments in Escherichia coli (E. coli). In principle, the mutant allele to be introduced is provided on a so-called s ...

In the last few years, mutagenesis of viruses with large DNA genomes (like the herpesviruses) was simplified by cloning the viral genomes as bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) and their subsequent transfer into Escherichia coli (E. coli.). Owing to the high frequency of restriction s ...

Herpesviruses form a family of DNA viruses that are of considerable medical importance (1). Although the genomes of many members of the herpesviruses have been completely sequenced, our knowledge on the function of the majority of herpesvirus genes is still quite insufficient. This is espe ...

Herpesviruses have been detected in a vast variety of vertebrate species and in at least one invertebrate. It is anticipated that the approx 120 different herpesviruses known today represents only a fraction of the number that actually exists (1). Each virus is closely associated with its main ...

Transgenic mice are widely used for determination of gene function and to generate animal models of human disease (1). Such mice are generated by introducing a gene of interest into the genome and ectopically expressing it using a heterologous promoter. The choice of the heterologous promot ...

Bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) have become a central tool in functional genomics. This is due to their average cloning capacity (around 150 Kb), which can accommodate most eukaryotic genes along with their full set of regulatory elements, and to their greater convenience in hand ...

Recombinogenic engineering, or the modification and cloning of DNA molecules via homologous recombination, has opened up a new era. In contrast to conventional cloning strategies, recombinogenic engineering can be carried out at virtually any chosen position on a given target DNA mol ...

In the era of functional genomics, bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) is an ideal choice of vector for cloning and manipulating large DNA fragments (1). In addition to providing a system that is able to maintain large DNA fragments (average insert size approx 150–200 kb), BAC DNA can be purified by ...

Bacterial artificial chromosomes (BAC) are F-factor plasmid based vectors that are maintained as 1 or 2 copy plasmids in their bacterial host strain. BACs have the capacity for maintaining large, often more than 300 kb fragments of mammalian DNA as stable inserts and avoid much of the insert chime ...

Large DNA (100 kb) transformation methods have been reported in tomato using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation (1) and tobacco using biolistic bombardment (2). Both methods used modified bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) such as BIBAC or pBACwich. BIBAC vector (used ...

Alterations in DNA copy number underlie certain developmental abnormalities and are frequent in solid tumors. Microarray-based comparative genomic hybridization (array CGH) provides a high throughput means to measure and map copy number aberrations on a genome-wide scale and to l ...

Vertebrate genomes are globally heavily methylated at the sequence CpG with the exception of short patches of GC-rich DNA, usually between 1–2 kb in size, which are free of methylation and these are known as CpG islands (see refs. 1 and 2 for reviews). In addition to distinctive DNA characteristics, CpG i ...

Positional cloning involves the genetic, physical, and transcript mapping of specific parts of a genome (1). Linkage analysis can map specific activities, or phenotypes, to a quantitative trait locus (QTL), a genomic region no smaller than 1 centiMorgan (cM) or megabase (Mb) in length. Physic ...