The pathogenesis of infections caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the causative agent of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea, can be studied using experimental infection of human male volunteers. The desire to avoid introducing new antibiotic resistance markers into strains to be used in human experimental infection has complicated the construction of genetically defined mutants in which e...

Selectable marker genes (SMGs) have been extraordinarily useful in enabling plant transformation because of the low efficiency of transgene integration. The most used SMGs encode proteins resistant to antibiotics or herbicides and use negative selection, i.e., by killing nontransgenic tissue. However, there are perceived risks in wide-scale deployment of SMG-transgenic plants, and therefore res...

A set of yeast strains based on Saccharomyces cerevisiae S288C in which commonly used selectable marker genes are deleted by design based on the yeast genome sequence has been constructed and analysed. These strains minimize or eliminate the homology to the corresponding marker genes in commonly used vectors without significantly affecting adjacent gene expression. Because the homology between ...

A new genetic marker was created in which sequences from enhanced green fluorescent protein were fused to those of puromycin N-acetyl transferase. The resulting fusion protein (EGFP-puro) conferred both green fluorescence and resistance to puromycin when expressed in mammalian cells. The utility of EGFP-puro as a selectable/screenable marker was demonstrated by the ease with which a recombinant...