RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a digital display of a transcriptome using next-generation sequencing technologies and provides detailed, high-throughput view of the transcriptome. The first step in RNA-Seq is to isolate whole transcriptome from total RNA. Since large ribosomal RNA ( ...
Comprehensive evaluation of microbial diversity in almost any environment is now possible. Questions such as “Does the addition of fiber to the diet of humans change the gastrointestinal microbiota?” can now be answered easily and inexpensively. Tag-encoded FLX-amplicon pyrosequ ...
Metagenomics has evolved over the last 3 decades from the analysis of single genes and their apparent diversity in an ecosystem to the provision of complex genetic information relating to whole ecosystems. Metagenomics is a vast subject area in terms of methodology, which encompasses a suite ...
The digestive tract of animals contains a very large numbers of microorganisms with a high diversity. Traditionally, characterization of these microbial communities has relied on the ability to clonally culture each microorganism. With significant improvements in nucleotide ...
Metatranscriptomics has been developed to help understand how communities respond to changes in their environment. Metagenomic studies provided a snapshot of the genetic composition of the community at any given time. However, short-timescale studies investigating the respo ...
Whole-genome techniques toward identification of microbial genes required for their survival and growth during infection have been useful for studies of bacterial pathogenesis. The advent of massively parallel sequencing platforms has created the opportunity to markedly ac ...
Next-generation sequencing technologies have a massive throughput, which dramatically reduces the cost of sequencing per gigabase, compared to standard Sanger sequencing. To make the most efficient use of this throughput when sequencing small regions or genomes, we developed a ba ...
With rapid development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, it is becoming increasingly feasible to sequence entire genomes of various organisms from virus to human. However, in many occasions, it is still more practical to sequence and analyze only small regions of the ent ...
The library preparation step is of critical importance for the quality of next-generation sequencing data. The use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) as a part of the standard Illumina library preparation protocol causes an appreciable proportion of the obtained sequences to be dupl ...
DNA library preparation is a common entry point and bottleneck for next-generation sequencing. Current methods generally consist of distinct steps that often involve significant sample loss and hands-on time: DNA fragmentation, end-polishing, and adaptor-ligation. In vitro tr ...
Cytosine methylation is an epigenetic mark that has a significant impact on the regulation of transcription and replication of DNA. DNA methylation patterns are highly conserved across cell divisions and are therefore highly heritable. Furthermore, in multicellular organisms, D ...
The most polymorphic genetic markers are DNA regions composed of variable number tandem repeats (VNTRs) (1,2). Detection of the various VNTRs is possible by restriction fragment-length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis using the Southern blot procedure (3). However, this procedure is ti ...
The genes of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region control a variety of functions involved in the immune response and influence susceptibility to over 40 diseases. The region maps to the short arm of chromosome 6 and is divided into three regions, denoted class I, II, and III. The HLA class II gene complex ...
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) approach to chromosome assignment consists of analyzing the profile of specific amplification products of the gene of interest using genomic DNAs from a panel of somatic cell hybrids as templates (see Fig 1). Each hybrid somatic cell line contains the nor ...
One of the greatest potentials of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) lies in the fact that even minute amounts of target DNA or extensively damaged DNA can be successfully amplified in vitro and thus become amenable to further study. This enables a detailed molecular analysis of small amounts of DNA f ...
The production of transgenic mice by the direct microinjection of DNA fragments into isolated mouse embryos is now a standard technique for molecular and developmental analysis (1). Traditionally, the initial screening of litters of mice for those carrying the transgene has been carri ...
The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) has rapidly become a standard laboratory technique. With the continuous development of PCR technology there is now a growing need for PCR product quantitation in areas such as therapeutic monitoring and quality control, disease diagnosis, and regul ...
Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was originally introduced to amplify in vitro particular DNA sequences by the application of temperature cycles (1). In a modification, RNA molecules also may serve as templates by an additional reverse transcription step converting RNA in complement ...
The S1 nuclease protection assay involves the hybridization in solution of a single-stranded DNA probe to RNA, followed by digestion with S1 nuclease, which is specific for single-stranded nucleic acid (1). The protected probe is measured by first resolving the sample by denaturing gel elec ...
Among numerous applications, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (1,2) provides a convenient means to clone 5′ ends of rare mRNAs and to generate cDNA libraries from tissue available in amounts too low to be processed by conventional methods. Basically, the amplification of cDNAs by the PCR req ...