BACKGROUND Molecular genotyping of Bacillus anthracis, the etiologic agent of anthrax, is important for differentiating and identifying strains from different geographic areas and for tracing strains deliberately released in a bioterrorism attack. We previously described a multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat (VNTR) analysis (MLVA) based on 25 marker loci. Although the method has great ...

Homologous recombination (HR) is the major pathway for repairing double strand breaks (DSBs) in eukaryotes and XRCC2 is an essential component of the HR repair machinery. To evaluate the potential role of mutations in gene repair by HR in individuals susceptible to differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC) we used high resolution melting (HRM) analysis, a recently introduced method for detecting m...

WU and KI polyomaviruses are novel viruses of the Polyomaviridae family, which have been identified recently in respiratory secretions from patients with acute respiratory tract infection. Their potential role in respiratory disease is still unclear and requires additional investigation. To facilitate further studies and diagnosis, a real-time PCR with melting curve analysis was optimized and e...

Solid (4)He has been created off the melting curve by growth at a nearly constant mass via the "blocked capillary" technique and growth from the (4)He superfluid at constant temperature. The experimental apparatus allows injection of (4)He atoms from superfluid directly into the solid. Evidence for the superfluidlike transport of mass through a sample cell filled with hcp solid (4)He off the me...

We report structural data on liquid iron at pressures up to 58 GPa measured by x-ray scattering in a laser heated diamond anvil cell. The determined structure factor preserves essentially the same shape along the melting curve. Our data demonstrate that liquid iron at high pressures is a close-packed hard-sphere liquid. The results place important constraints on the thermodynamic and transport ...

a peak within 1–2 °C of the predicted T m. This allows T m peaks, which indicate the presence or absence of a PCR product, to be strategically placed within the typical melting curve range of 45–70 °C for hybridization probes. Over this melting curve range we feel it should be possible to clearly distinguish three peaks in a single channel. This potentially makes it possible to multiplex six mu...

Featured Article: Wittwer CT, Reed GH, Gundry CN, Vandersteen JG, Pryor RJ. High-resolution genotyping by amplicon melting analysis using LCGreen. Clin Chem 2003;49:853– 60. DNA melting (the denaturation of DNA by heat) is a fundamental property of DNA that can be used as an analytical tool. Classic studies of DNA melting monitored the absorbance near 260 nm as the temperature was increased and...

High-resolution melting of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products can detect heterozygous mutations and most homozygous mutations without electrophoretic or chromatographic separations. However, some homozygous single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) have melting curves identical to that of the wild-type, as predicted by nearest neighbor thermodynamic models. In these cases, if DNA of a known r...

Diverse JAK2 exon 12 mutations have been described in patients with V617F-negative polycythemia vera. Development of a sensitive detection assay capable of identifying any of these mutations is required for medium-throughput diagnostic screens. Non-mutated and mutant JAK2 exon 12 alleles were amplified from patient samples and cloned into plasmid vectors, then used to determine the sensitivity ...