BACKGROUND Hypoxanthine guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (Hprt) is known as a house-keeping gene, and has been used as an internal control for real-time quantitative RT-PCR and various other methods of gene expression analysis. To evaluate the Hprt mRNA levels as a reference standard, we engineered a luciferase reporter driven by a long Hprt promoter and measured its response to cytotoxicity. ...

The genome of the broad host range Streptomyces temperate phage, phiC31, is known to integrate into the host chromosome via an enzyme that is a member of the resolvase/invertase family of site-specific recombinases. The recombination properties of this novel integrase on the phage and Streptomyces ambofaciens attachment sites, attP and attB, respectively, were investigated in the heterologous h...

The integrase from the Streptomyces phage phiC31 carries out efficient recombination between the attP site in the phage genome and the attB site in the host bacterial chromosome. In this paper, we show that the enzyme also functions in human cells. A plasmid assay system was constructed that measured intramolecular integration of attP into attB. This assay was used to demonstrate that in the pr...

PhiC31 integrase is a serine recombinase containing an N-terminal domain (NTD) that provides catalytic activity and a large C-terminal domain that controls which pair of DNA substrates is able to synapse. We show here that substitutions in amino acid V129 in the NTD can lead to defects in synapsis and DNA cleavage, indicating that the NTD also has an important role in synapsis.

Conditional expression of hairpin constructs in Drosophila is a powerful method to disrupt the activity of single genes with a spatial and temporal resolution that is impossible, or exceedingly difficult, using classical genetic methods. We previously described a method (Ni et al. 2008) whereby RNAi constructs are targeted into the genome by the phiC31-mediated integration approach using Vermil...

Antibiotic selectable marker genes have been widely used to generate transgenic animals. Once transgenic animals have been obtained, the selectable marker is no longer necessary but raises public concerns regarding biological safety. The aim of this study was to prepare competent antibiotic selectable marker free transgenic cells for somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). PhiC31 intergrase was u...

We developed an efficient strategy that combines a method for the post-integration elimination of all transposon sequences, a site-specific recombination system, and an optimized fibroin H-chain expression system to produce a stable, replaceable, highly efficient transgene expression system in the silkworm (Bombyx mori) that overcomes the disadvantages of random insertion and post-integration i...

BACKGROUND The Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus (Skuse), is a vector of several arboviruses including dengue and chikungunya. This highly invasive species originating from Southeast Asia has travelled the world in the last 30 years and is now established in Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean. In the absence of vaccine or antiviral drugs, efficient m...