In healthy humans, 60-70% of the B lymphocytes produce kappa light chains, while the remaining cells produce lambda light chains. Malignant transformation and clonal expansion of B lymphocytes lead to an altered kappa : lambda expression ratio, which is an important diagnostic criteria of lymphomas. Here, we compared three methods for clonality determination of suspected B cell lymphomas. Tumor...

Cellular proteins have been implicated as important for HIV-1 reverse transcription, but whether any are reverse transcription complex (RTC) cofactors or affect reverse transcription indirectly is unclear. Here we used protein fractionation combined with an endogenous reverse transcription assay to identify cellular proteins that stimulated late steps of reverse transcription in vitro. We ident...

Microarray technologies, which enable the simultaneous measurement of all RNA transcripts in a cell, have spawned the development of algorithms for reverse-engineering transcription control networks. In this article, we classify the algorithms into two general strategies: physical modeling and influence modeling. We discuss the biological and computational principles underlying each strategy, a...

After mixed infection, up to half of related retroviruses are recombinants. During infection, retroviral RNA genomes are first converted to complementary DNA (cDNA) and then to double-stranded DNA. Thus recombination could occur during reverse transcription, by RNA template switching, or after reverse transcription, by breakage and reunion of DNA. It has not been possible to distinguish between...

Both retroviruses and long terminal repeat (LTR) retrotransposons use cellular tRNAs as primers for reverse transcription during their replication cycles. In retroviruses, primer tRNA is selectively packaged into the virion, where it is placed onto the primer binding site (PBS) of the viral RNA genome and used to prime the reverse transcriptase (RT)-catalyzed synthesis of minus-strand cDNA. Stu...

The first lab-on-chip system for picoliter droplet generation and RNA isolation, followed by reverse transcription, and PCR amplification with real-time fluorescence detection in the trapped droplets has been developed. The system utilized a shearing T-junction in a fused-silica device to generate a stream of monodisperse picoliter-scale droplets that were isolated from the microfluidic channel...

Reverse transcription of retroviral genomes into double stranded DNA is a key event for viral replication. The very first stage of HIV reverse transcription, the initiation step, involves viral and cellular partners that are selectively packaged into the viral particle, leading to an RNA/protein complex with very specific structural and functional features, some of which being, in the case of H...

A broadly reactive and highly sensitive reverse transcription-quantitative PCR assay to detect salivirus/klassevirus was developed. By means of the developed assay, salivirus/klassevirus was detected in 13 (93%) raw sewage, 4 (29%) secondary-treated sewage, and 9 (16%) river water samples, with a maximum concentration of 9.7 × 10(6) copies/liter.