Prediction programs for general PCR (or random PCR) products had been developed [3, 2]. These programs had been experimentally shown to be highly accurate in its prediction [2]. On the other hand, random PCR have been demonstrating that it is very useful as an elementary technology of genome profiling [1], in which random PCR products (a set of DNA fragments extracted from various parts of geno...

Technical developments in molecular biology have found extensive applications in the field of microbial ecology. Among these techniques, fingerprinting methods such as denaturing gel electrophoresis (DGE, including the three options: DGGE, TGGE and TTGE) has been applied to environmental samples over this last decade. Microbial ecologists took advantage of this technique, originally developed f...

As the understanding of the links between genetic mutations and diseases continues to grow, there is an increasing need for techniques that can rapidly, inexpensively, and sensitively detect DNA sequence alterations. Typically, such analyses are performed on PCR-amplified gene regions. Automated DNA sequencing by capillary array electrophoresis can be used, but is expensive to apply to large nu...

The thermal stability of folded transcripts of the td intron of bacteriophage T4 that carried up to three base substitutions was investigated by temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TGGE) and UV melting. The unfolding of this autocatalytic group I intron is endothermic and entropically driven. Although the effects of mutations in base pairs follow in most cases the expected order G-C>A-U>G...

We developed a method to produce, identify and analyze DNA fragments for the purpose of taxonomic classification. Genome profiling (GP) is a strategy that identifies genomic DNA fragments common to closely related species without prior knowledge of the DNA sequence. Random PCR, one of the key technologies of GP, is used to produce fragments and may be used even when there are mutations at the p...

This study was on the technical and biological characteristics of a partial-SHARON submerged-filter bioreactor of 3 L. The main focus was the influence of the hydraulic retention time (HRT) on biofilms. For this purpose, we used molecular tools based on the partial 16S rRNA genes. The results showed that the HRT may affect the nitrification processes of a bioreactor using synthetic wastewater c...