It has been shown that the Rhesus (Rh) blood group antigens are encoded by two homologous genes: the Rh D gene and the Rh CcEe gene. The Rh CcEe gene encodes different peptides: the Rh C, c, E, and e polypeptides. Only one nucleotide difference has been found between the alleles encoding the Rh E and the Rh e antigen polypeptides. It is a C -+ G transition at nucleotide position 676, which lead...

Protein arginine methyltransferases, which catalyze the transfer of methyl groups from S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) to arginine side chains in target proteins, regulate transcription, RNA processing, and receptor-mediated signaling. To specifically address the functional role of the individual members of this family, we took a "bump-and-hole" approach and designed a series of N(6)-substituted S-a...

This report describes a single-step extension approach suitable for high-throughput single-nucleotide polymorphism typing applications. The method relies on extension of paired allele-specific primers and we demonstrate that the reaction kinetics were slower for mismatched configurations compared with matched configurations. In our approach we employ apyrase, a nucleotide degrading enzyme, to a...

This paper presented the authors' search for allele-specific disparity in breast cancer using paired blood tumor samples from a large cohort of breast cancer patients in different stages. Using a workflow/algorithm developed in this paper using B-allele frequency and log R ratio of Illumina SNP data to estimate Euclidean distances, the authors were able to detect SNPs with substantial differenc...

Small interfering RNA (siRNA) holds therapeutic promise for silencing dominantly acting disease genes, particularly if mutant alleles can be targeted selectively. In mammalian cell models we demonstrate that allele-specific silencing of disease genes with siRNA can be achieved by targeting either a linked single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) or the disease mutation directly. For a polyglutamine...

UNLABELLED In a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of an admixed population, such as Hispanic Americans, ancestry-specific allele frequencies can inform the design of a replication GWAS. We derive an EM algorithm to estimate ancestry-specific allele frequencies for a bi-allelic marker given genotypes and local ancestries on a 3-way admixed population, when the phase of each admixed individual...