BACKGROUND Wide-scale application of urine-based screening of asymptomatic men for chlamydial infection has not been thoroughly assessed. GOAL The goal was to compare clinical and economic consequences of three strategies: (1). no screening, (2). screening with ligase chain reaction (LCR) assay of urine, and (3). prescreening urine with a leukocyte esterase test (LE) and confirming positives ...

Lycii cortex radicis (LCR) is a traditional Korean medicinal herb. The present study was undertaken to examine the effect of an LCR extract on glioma cell growth and to determine its molecular mechanism in U87MG human glioma cells. The LCR extract resulted in apoptotic cell death in a dose- and time-dependent manner. The LCR extract-induced cell d...

The laryngeal chemoreflex (LCR) is elicited by water in the larynx and leads to apnea and respiratory disruption in immature animals. The LCR is exaggerated by the elevation of brain temperature within or near the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) in decerebrate piglets. Thermal prolongation of reflex apnea elicited by superior laryngeal nerve stimulation is reduced by systemic administration...

Locus control regions (LCRs) refer to cis-acting elements composed of several DNase I hypersensitive sites, which synergize to protect transgenes from integration-site dependent effects in a tissue-specific manner. LCRs have been identified in many immunologically important gene loci, including one between the TCRdelta/TCRalpha gene segments and the ubiquitously expressed Dad1 gene. Expression ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the sensitivity and specificity of ligase chain reaction (LCR) analysis of cervical and urine specimens from women compared with cell culture of cervical and urethral specimens for the diagnosis of genitourinary chlamydial infection. METHODS Women (n = 624) attending the Genitourinary Medicine Clinic at University College London Hospitals, were enrolled. Patients who ha...

Our aim was to investigate the use of DNA amplification with the ligase chain reaction (LCR) for detection of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex directly in human clinical specimens. The LCR assay employed was the Abbott LCx MTB Assay, which uses the gene encoding protein antigen b as the target template. Four hundred eighty-two samples from 457 patients in one clinical microbiology laborat...

Activation of eukaryotic genes often relies on remote chromatin determinants. How these determinants function remains poorly understood. The hGH gene is activated by a 5'-remote locus control region (LCR). Pituitary-specific DNase I hypersensitive site I (HSI), the dominant hGH LCR element, is separated from the hGH-N promoter by a 14.5 kb span that encompasses the B-lymphocyte-specific CD79b g...

The human beta-globin genes are regulated by the locus control region (LCR), an element composed of multiple DNase I-hypersensitive sites (HS sites) located 5' to the genes. Various functional studies indicate that the LCR confers high-level, position-independent, and copy number-dependent expression to linked globin genes in transgenic mice. However, the structural basis for LCR function is un...

The high sensitivity of nucleic acid amplification tests such as ligase chain reaction (LCR) has the potential to simplify specimen collection for the microbiologic diagnosis of gonorrhea. We screened first-void urine specimens from 283 women attending a Birmingham, Ala., sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic by using LCR and compared the results to those of cervical and urethral cultures f...