Something I notice often in supervising new graduate students is their frustration with the irreproducibility of their biological data. For example, I am asked frequently ‘‘how many biological replicates do I need for qRT-PCR’’? The answer, of course, lies first with the students themselves. They need as many replicates as will persuade them of the validity of their observations. However, for m...

Recalling a past experience often requires the suppression of related memories that compete with the retrieval target, causing memory impairment known as retrieval-induced forgetting. Two experiments examined how retrieval-induced forgetting varies with the similarity of the competitor and the target item (target-competitor similarity) and with the similarity between the competitors themselves ...

Real-time PCR methods have become widely used within the past few years. However, real-time PCR is rarely used to study chronic diseases with low pathogen loads, presumably because of insufficient sensitivity. In this report, we developed an integrated nucleic acid isolation and real-time PCR platform that vastly improved the sensitivity of the quantitative detection of the intracellular bacter...

Quantitative real-time PCR (polymerase chain reaction) assays are increasingly used to measure quantities of nucleic acids in samples. They may be used to provide a high-throughput alternative to more traditional biological assays. In this case, a calibration process may be required to convert the PCR measurements onto a more relevant scale. This is most commonly undertaken using simple linear ...

We report an original application of competitive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for the quantification of MDR1 mRNA in clinical specimens by simultaneous reverse transcription and PCR amplification of cellular RNA with decreasing amounts of an internal standard. The competitor RNA shares the same MDR1 primer sequences as the cellular mRNA, but yields a different-sized ...

objective: inhibition of apoptosis may favor the onset and progression of cancer. survivin is an inhibitor of apoptosis that has been considered as a potential marker for diagnostic and/or prognostic of bladder cancer. the survivin protein regulates both cell division and cell death and is overexpressed in the vast majority of human cancers. in this study, the expression pattern and potential p...

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9)-based technology is currently the most flexible means to create targeted mutations by recombination or indel mutations by nonhomologous end joining. During mouse transgenesis, recombinant and indel alleles are often pursued simultaneously. Multiple alleles can be formed in each animal to create...

Although the genome sequences of many microorganisms are now known, whole-genome DNA microarray platforms consisting of PCR amplicon, or oligonucleotide elements printed onto glass slides have been readily available for only a relatively few, highly studied microorganisms. For those microorganisms more recently cultured or studied by fewer investigators it has been difficult to justify the init...