We used 20 different commercial enzymic kits to measure cholesterol in 19 commercial control sera and in a pooled specimen of human serum and compared the relative biases, with the Abell -Kendall procedure as reference. Our purpose was to select those sera in various enzymic kits showing behavior similar to that of human serum and which thus can be used to measure the accuracy of these kits. Th...

Streptococcus porcinus is usually associated with swine. Because we have received several isolates from human sources that had cross-reacted with commercial group B streptococcal reagents, we examined several commercial kits to determine the extent of this cross-reaction. Fifteen reference and 15 clinical strains of S. porcinus were tested for cross-reactions with group B streptococcal reagents...

Real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is the gold standard for expression analysis. Designed to improve reproducibility and sensitivity, commercial kits are commonly used for the critical step of cDNA synthesis. The present study was designed to determine the impact of these kits. mRNA from mouse brains were pooled to create serial dilutions ranging from 0.0625 μg to 2...

BACKGROUND H. pylori is a urease positive organism, and this activity in a gastric biopsy could be considered as a proof of the presence of H. pylori. For the reasons of high price and difficult accessibility to the commercial CLO-test in Iran, we designed an affordable equivalent test with high specificity, accuracy and availability. METHODS Biopsy samples from 80 symptomatic patients with g...

PURPOSE Uveitis is an important complication of systemic leptospirosis that can occur months to years after systemic infection. The gold standard technique Microscopic Agglutination Test (MAT) is less sensitive and more complicated. All the commercial kits currently available are for early detection of acute systemic leptospiral infection. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency...