Influenza infections in humans, from the common seasonal flu to the deadly pandemics of the 20th century, are caused chiefly by influenza A and influenza B viruses. Understanding the in vivo dynamics ...
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Gram-negative bacterial infections are an ongoing challenge to health care providers worldwide. Detection, treatment and control of such pathogens have gained increasing importance in the context of a...
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Macrophages are white blood cells that ingest foreign material and play a crucial role in the immune system. Presently, there is no bovine macrophage cell line available for research and testing purpo...
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Regenerative medicine requires a practical, high throughput method of assessing the cellular components of multicellular entities before transplantation. Such a method would have many clinical and res...
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In addition to the common cold, human rhinoviruses (RV) trigger nearly half of all cases of asthma exacerbation. Wheezing illnesses in infancy caused by RV are associated with a high risk of developin...
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Human rhinoviruses (species A, B and C) encompass more than 160 types that are responsible for the majority of upper respiratory tract infections (common colds) and many of the lower respiratory tract...
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Schizophrenia is a complex neuropsychiatric disease afflicting up to 1 percent of the worldwide population. It affects perception, behavior and thinking and can have devastating social ramifications. ...
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Fluorescent proteins can be found today in most molecular biology laboratories. Since the discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) in the early 1960s, fluorescent molecules have revolutionized man...
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Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is used to generate copies of a particular DNA sequence. The technique is common and indispensable in many research applications. Unfortunately, methods for isolating/p...
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Fatty acids generally can be classified as straight-chain or non-straight-chain. Non-straight-chain fatty acids are less abundant and highly valued in dietary supplements, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, ...
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Pyruvate is a starting material for synthesizing a variety of biofuels and chemicals. It can be readily converted into more than 60 commercial chemicals, including ethanol and several active pharmaceu...
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As the industrial uses of yeast and other fungi expand, new systems are needed to genetically optimize strains for their intended use. In particular, the ability to manipulate prototrophic and diploid...
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Enzymes called ribonucleotidyl transferases (NTases) add nucleotides to the ends of RNAs. At present only a few such enzymes are known, such as poly(A) polymerases and poly(U) polymerases. The selecti...
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Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cells shed from tumor deposits that flow into the bloodstream. They are detected at a frequency of about one CTC per one billion surrounding blood cells. The great h...
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Metabolomics, or the systematic study of all metabolites in an organism, is one of the fastest growing areas of scientific research. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one tool used to a...
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‘Nanopore sequencing’ allows a single molecule such as DNA to be analyzed without conventional tools like chemical labels or costly optical instruments. In the process, DNA strands and a stream of...
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Mass spectrometers are analytical instruments that can precisely measure the mass of molecules to determine their composition and identity. Generally, the molecules are ionized and then accelerated by...
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In the past decade, cataloguing the thousands of proteins present in a cell using mass spectrometry (MS) has matured into a procedure both deeply vital and straightforward. Yet discovering how such mo...
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Reprogramming blood cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) provides a novel tool for studying hematopoietic development in vitro.
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Reprogramming blood cells to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) provides a novel tool for studying blood development in vitro.
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To save time and costs, many alternatives to conventional DNA sequencing have been proposed. One approach utilizes an array of oligonucleotide probes (short nucleic acid chains) synthesized by photoli...
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Disulfide bonds between cysteine residues are the most common crosslinking agents in proteins. Reducing these bonds is an ordinary procedure in biochemistry and biotechnology. The most commonly used r...
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Most biological processes involve multiple proteins interacting with each other. While the principles governing protein-protein interactions are not fully understood, it is known that a small subset o...
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In animals, plants and other eukaryotic organisms, typically one protein is translated from each mRNA. Usually, translation can start only at one end of the mRNA strand. In contrast, several viruses ...
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Restriction enzymes are commonly used to cleave double-stranded DNA. These enzymes bind to specific sequences of DNA (the ‘restriction site’) and cleave the DNA either at the recognition site or a...
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