PCR-based solid-phase minisequencing method was used to analyze the steady-state mRNA levels of the porphobilinogen deaminase gene in eight patients with acute intermittent porphyria. The patients had the earlier characterized mutations 517C --> T (R173W), 518G --> A (R173Q), 673C --> G (R225G), 673C --> T (R225X), 713T --> G (L278P), and 1073delA (frame shift). All mutations, except the missen...

MOTIVATION Next-generation sequencing technologies are being rapidly applied to quantifying transcripts (RNA-seq). However, due to the unique properties of the RNA-seq data, the differential expression of longer transcripts is more likely to be identified than that of shorter transcripts with the same effect size. This bias complicates the downstream gene set analysis (GSA) because the methods ...

A real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method is described that enabled the detection and quantification of E2A-PBX1 fusion gene transcripts associated with t(1;19). The method was highly reproducible and offered exceptional sensitivity at 5 fg of fusion transcript per reaction, without the need for a nested PCR primer design. To illustrate the usefulness of this n...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS The epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) is a Na(+) transport channel located in the apical membrane of the human middle ear epithelium. Although ENaC-mediated sodium transport has been reported to be upregulated by dexamethasone in human middle ear epithelium, there has been no study of the downstream pathways for increased ENaC expression mediated by glucocorticoids in this ...

Wounding of plants leads to endogenous rise of jasmonic acid (JA) accompanied with the expression of a distinct set of genes. Among them are those coding for the allene oxide cyclase (AOC) that catalyses a regulatory step in JA biosynthesis, and for 1-deoxy-D-xylulose 5-phosphate synthase 2 (DXS2), an enzyme involved in isoprenoid biosynthesis. To address the question how roots and shoots of Me...

Prostate cancer is a clinically and biologically heterogeneous disease. Deregulation of splice variants has been shown to contribute significantly to this complexity. High-throughput technologies such as oligonucleotide microarrays allow for the detection of transcripts that play a role in disease progression in a transcriptome-wide level. In this study, we use a publicly available dataset of n...

PURPOSE Retinal ischemia appears to lead to alterations in retinal transcript levels of a group of genes known to be abundantly expressed in the lens. Our purpose is to study whether these alterations are truly the result of retinal ischemia or whether they could be caused by contamination of the retinal tissue with trace amounts of lens tissue. METHODS Changes occurring in the retinal gene e...

Reducing oxidative damage is thought to be an effective aging intervention. Açai, a fruit indigenous to the Amazon, is rich in phytochemicals that possesses high anti-oxidant activities, and has anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer and anti-cardiovascular disease properties. However, little is known about its potential anti-aging properties especially at the organismal level. Here we evaluated the ef...

Gastric cancer is one of the most common cancers and has the highest mortality rate worldwide. It is worthwhile to explore the mechanism of gastric cancer progression. An increasing number of studies have found that non-coding RNAs including miRNA and lncRNA play important roles in gastric cancer progression. This review summarized the role of ectopic miRNA in gastric cancer proliferation, grow...

BACKGROUND The relationships between total serum IgE levels and gene expression patterns in peripheral blood CD4+ T cells (in all subjects and within each sex specifically) are not known. METHODS Peripheral blood CD4+ T cells from 223 participants from the Childhood Asthma Management Program (CAMP) with simultaneous measurement of IgE. Total RNA was isolated, and expression profiles were gene...