The aim of this study was to determine the occurrence of enterotoxigenic and enteroaggregative Escherichia coli strains and antibiotic resistance of the isolates in raw milk and unpasteurized cheese. Out of 200 samples of raw milk and 50 samples of unpasteurized cheeses, 96 and 24 strains of E. coli were isolated, respectively. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to detec...

Suitable alterations in gene expression are believed to allow animals to survive drastic changes in environmental conditions. Drosophila melanogaster larvae cease eating and exit moist food to search for dry pupation sites after the foraging stage in what is known as the wandering stage. Although the behavioral change from foraging to wandering causes desiccation stress, the mechanism by which ...

The enormous diversity of uncultured microorganisms in soil and other environments provides a potentially rich source of novel natural products, which is critically important for drug discovery efforts. Our investigators reported previously on the creation and screening of an Escherichia coli library containing soil DNA cloned and expressed in a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vector. In ...

Transformation of the diploid oomycete plant pathogen Phytophthora infestans with antisense, sense, and promoter-less constructs of the coding sequence of the elicitin gene inf1 resulted in transcriptional silencing of both the transgenes and the endogenous gene. Since heterokaryons obtained by somatic fusion of an inf1-silenced transgenic strain and a wild-type strain displayed stable gene sil...

Gram-negative bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulates phagocytic leukocytes by interacting with the cell surface protein CD14. Cellular responses to LPS are markedly potentiated by the LPS-binding protein (LBP), a lipid-transfer protein that binds LPS aggregates and transfers LPS monomers to CD14. LBP also transfers LPS to lipoproteins, thereby promoting the neutralization of LPS. LBP pre...

Introduction – Smoking and Non-smoking Guns: Sometimes it may seem obvious that a lateral gene transfer (LGT) event has occurred. For example, consider the fact that a multi-gene phylogenetic analysis of Rafflesiacaea, a family of flowering plants that includes Rafflesia arnoldii, which has the largest flower in the world, places it within the order Malpighiales, a diverse order containing such...

One commonly used, yet little understood method for transferring DNA into cells is the temperature shock transformation method (TST) that exposes competent bacteria to successive temperatures (4C and 42C). This study tested the effect of the gene for the heatstable nucleoid structuring protein (H-NS) on the efficiency of the TST method in an effort to find a way to improve the transformation ef...

OBJECTIVES p16 is known to be an important tumor suppressor gene and is also called MTS1 (multiple tumor suppressive gene 1). Especially in the case of non-small cell lung cancer, it was not expressed in more than 70% of cell lines examined. To determine changes in cell-cycle related proteins and the tumorigenic effect, we, therefore, transfected p16INK4A gene into lung cancer cell lines. MET...

Accurately predicting essential genes is important in many aspects of biology, medicine and bioengineering. In previous research, we have developed a machine learning based integrative algorithm to predict essential genes in bacterial species. This algorithm lends itself to two approaches for predicting essential genes: learning the traits from known essential genes in the target organism, or t...