Recent experimental advances facilitate the collection of time series data that indicate which genes in a cell are expressed. This information can be used to understand the genetic regulatory network that generates the data. Typically, Bayesian analysis approaches are applied which neglect the time series nature of the experimental data, have difficulty in determining the direction of causality...

Therapeutic vaccination against cancer is an important approach which, when combined with other therapies, can improve long-term control of cancer. In fact, the induction of adaptive immune responses against Tumor Associated Antigens (TAAs) as well as innate immunity are important factors for tumor stabilization/eradication. A variety of immunization technologies have been explored in last deca...

Infections of the lizard malaria parasite Plasmodium mexicanum are often genetically complex within their fence lizard host (Sceloporus occidentalis) harbouring two or more clones of parasite. The role of clonal diversity in transmission success was studied for P. mexicanum by feeding its sandfly vectors (Lutzomyia vexator and Lutzomyia stewarti) on experimentally infected lizards. Experimental...

Tools for the genetic manipulation of Trypanosoma cruzi are largely unavailable, although several vectors for transfection of epimastigotes and expression of foreign or recombinant genes have been developed. We have previously constructed several plasmid vectors in which recombinant genes are expressed in T. cruzi using the rRNA promoter. In this report, we demonstrate that one of these vectors...

Gene therapy is a novel method under investigation for the treatment of genetic, metabolic and neurologic diseases, cancer and AIDS. The primary goal of gene therapy is to deliver a specific gene to a pre-determined target cell, and to direct expression of such a gene in a manner which will result in a therapeutic effect. Retroviral vectors have the ability to integrate in the host cell DNA irr...

It is hypothesized that a mapping of the biochemical properties of genetic nucleotides into the three dimensional R3 Clifford algebra will yield a novel and meaningful evolutionary distance measure. The nucleotides A,T,C,G are mapped according to three biochemical properties (amino/keto, purine/pyrimidine, weak/strong), resulting in four base-vectors. A weighted linear combination of the base-v...

Fitting only the leading principal components allows genetic covariance matrices to be modelled parsimoniously, yielding reduced rank estimates. If principal components with non-zero variances are omitted from the model, genetic variation is moved into the covariance matrices for residuals or other random effects. The resulting bias in estimates of genetic eigen-values and -vectors is examined.

A long time has passed since the first clinical trial with adenoviral (Ad) vectors. Despite being very promising, Ad vectors soon revealed their limitations in human clinical trials. The pre-existing immunity, the marked liver tropism and the high toxicity of first generation Ad (FG-Ad) vectors have been the main challenges for the development of new approaches. Significant effort toward the de...

Background The primary goal of any recombinant protein production is to achieve successful gene transfer and expression in a target cell. There are two general categories of delivery vehicles/vectors employed in protein expression protocols. The first category includes the non-viral vectors, ranging from direct injection of DNA to complexing DNA with cationc lipds, polylysine, etc. The second c...