We report an original application of competitive reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for the quantification of MDR1 mRNA in clinical specimens by simultaneous reverse transcription and PCR amplification of cellular RNA with decreasing amounts of an internal standard. The competitor RNA shares the same MDR1 primer sequences as the cellular mRNA, but yields a different-sized ...

UNLABELLED Obesity and metabolic syndrome is increasing health problem worldwide. Among other ways, nutritional intervention using phytochemicals is important method for treatment and prevention of this disease. Recent studies have shown that certain phytochemicals could alter the expression of specific genes and microRNAs (miRNAs) that play a fundamental role in the pathogenesis of obesity. Fo...

Molecular nanodiagnostics applied to cancer may provide rapid and sensitive detection of cancer related molecular alterations, which would enable early detection even when those alterations occur only in a small percentage of cells. The use of gold nanoparticles derivatized with thiol modified oligonucleotides (Au-nanoprobes) for the detection of specific nucleic acid targets has been gaining m...

The accuracy of mRNA quantification by reverse transcription (RT) in conjunction with real-time PCR (qPCR) is limited by mRNA losses during sample preparation (cell lysis, RNA isolation, and DNA removal) and by inefficiencies in reverse transcription. To control for these losses and inefficiencies, a technique was developed that utilizes an exogenous internal reference mRNA (ref mRNA) along wit...

The dynamics of active human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection was monitored by competitive nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA) assays for quantification of IE1 (UL123) and pp67 (UL65) mRNA expression levels in the blood of patients after lung transplantation. RNA was isolated from 339 samples of 13 lung transplant recipients and analyzed by the quantitative IE1 and pp67 NASBA in p...

Reverse transcription of extracted cellular RNA combined with real-time PCR is now an established method for sensitive detection and quantification of specific mRNA level changes in experimental models of neurological diseases. To neutralize the impact of experimental error and make quantification more precise, normalization of test gene data using data from a constantly expressed gene, a refer...