Viruses are the most abundant microorganisms in marine and freshwater environments and perhaps the most genetically diverse (Fuhrman and Suttle, 1993). Counting viruses in aquatic samples is now a routine matter, but assessing the diversity and dynamics within complex assemblages is still a challenge. DNA-based fingerprinting approaches, which rely on amplification of rRNA gene fragments by PCR...

Pulsed field gel electrophoresis allows separation and visualization of very large DNA molecules. This powerful technique is predominantly used in many aspects in molecular biology and medical diagnostics. Since the procedure for the preparation of the samples involves several steps, many different parameters can be changed and subsequently influence the resolution of the results. Therefore, in...

Gel electrophoresis is a fractionation/separation technique that yields valuable information in the field of metalloproteomics, often referred to as metallomics. This paper is based on four years of practical experience of the authors’ lab in this domain and highlights the capabilities and limitations of gel electrophoresis. Pitfalls of the technique were recognized by identifying the origin of...

We developed a rapid pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) method that required 3 days to complete, an improvement over the standard method that required as many as 8 days. The accuracy and reproducibility of the rapid method were verified by analysis of DNA band sizes of our control group B streptococcus isolate. The rapid method was superior to the standard method, providing more precise mo...

A statistical model is proposed which relates density profiles in 1-D electrophoresis gels, such as those produced by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), to databases of profiles of known genotypes. The warp in each gel lane is described by a trend that is linear in its parameters plus a first-order autoregressive process, and density differences are modelled by a mixture of two normal dis...

Far-field optical lens resolution is fundamentally limited by diffraction, which typically is about half of the wavelength. This is due to the evanescent waves carrying small scale information from an object that fades away in the far field. A recently proposed superlens theory offers a new approach by surface excitation at the negative index medium. We introduce a far-field optical superlens (...