BACKGROUND Measurement of circulating insulin may improve the classification and management of diabetes mellitus and assist in treating people with insulin resistance. METHODS A work group convened by the American Diabetes Association evaluated results for a panel of 39 single donor sera measured by 10 commercial insulin methods from 9 manufacturers against an isotope dilution-liquid chromato...

Genetic imputation has become standard practice in modern genetic studies. However, several important issues have not been adequately addressed including the utility of study-specific reference, performance in admixed populations, and quality for less common (minor allele frequency [MAF] 0.005-0.05) and rare (MAF < 0.005) variants. These issues only recently became addressable with genome-wide ...

The Easterlin paradox questions the way income can enter a utility function. Individuals are said to be sensitive not to the level of their income, but to their relative income as measured by the ratio between their income and the mean income of their reference group. We propose a reference group based on human capital and relate well-being to income dynamics using panel data with income variat...

MOTIVATION To increase the signal resolution for large-scale meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies, genotypes at unmeasured single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are commonly imputed using large multi-ethnic reference panels. However, the ever increasing size and ethnic diversity of both reference panels and cohorts makes genotype imputation computationally challenging for moderatel...

Transfer of influenza A viruses from animal hosts to man may lead to the emergence of new human pandemic strains. The early detection and identification of such events are therefore paramount in the surveillance of influenza viruses. To detect and partially characterize influenza A viruses from different animal species, a combined reverse transcription (RT)-PCR heteroduplex mobility assay (HMA)...

Genotype imputation has the potential to assess human genetic variation at a lower cost than assaying the variants using laboratory techniques. The performance of imputation for rare variants has not been comprehensively studied. We utilized 8865 human samples with high depth resequencing data for the exons and flanking regions of 202 genes and Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) data to chara...

OBJECTIVE Recently, Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has begun to supplant other technologies for gene mutation testing that is now required for targeted therapies. However, transfer of NGS technology to clinical daily practice requires validation. METHODS We validated the Ion Torrent AmpliSeq Colon and Lung cancer panel interrogating 1850 hotspots in 22 genes using the Ion Torrent Personal G...

A method using a commercially prepared colorimetric microdilution panel (ASTY; Kyokuto Pharmaceutical Industrial Co., Ltd.) was compared in four different laboratories with the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) reference microdilution method by testing 802 clinical isolates of Candida spp. (C. albicans, C. glabrata, C. tropicalis, C. parapsilosis, C. krusei, C. lusita...

Serial quantitation of BCR-ABL mRNA levels is an important indicator of therapeutic response for patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia and Philadelphia chromosome-positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but there is substantial variation in the real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction methodologies used by different testing laboratories. To help improve the comparability of results ...

Genomic studies measuring transcriptional responses to changing environments and stress currently make their way into the field of evolutionary ecology and ecotoxicology. To investigate a small to medium number of genes or to confirm large scale microarray studies, Quantitative Reverse Transcriptase PCR (RT-qPCR) can achieve high accuracy of quantification when key standards, such as normalizat...