Gene transfer technologies in mammals are the focus of renewed interest owing to the recent emphasis on analyzing gene function in the postgenomic era. Three important developments in this area include transgenics, gene targeting and nuclear transfer or animal cloning. These technological innovations have enhanced our ability to analyze gene function at the level of the whole organism and have ...

Comparative analyses of pathogen genomes provide new insights into how pathogens have evolved common and divergent virulence strategies to invade related plant species. Fusarium crown and root rots are important diseases of wheat and barley world-wide. In Australia, these diseases are primarily caused by the fungal pathogen Fusarium pseudograminearum. Comparative genomic analyses showed that th...

Efficient gene transfer into human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) holds great promise for regenerative medicine and pharmaceutical development. In the past decade, various methods were developed for gene transfer into hPSCs; however, hPSCs form tightly packed colonies, making gene transfer difficult. In this study, we established a stable culture method of hPSCs at a single-cell state to reduce...

objective(s): adeno-associated virus type 2 (aav2) vectors are widely used for both experimental and clinical gene therapy. a recent research has shown that the performance of these vectors can be greatly improved by substitution of specific surface-exposed tyrosine residues with phenylalanines. in this study, a fast and simple method is presented to generate aav2 vector helper plasmids encodin...

Advances in insect transgenesis and our knowledge of insect physiology and genomics are making it possible to create transgenic populations of beneficial or pest insects that express novel traits. There are contexts in which we may want the transgenes responsible for these traits to spread so that all individuals within a wild population carry them, a process known as population replacement. Tr...

Antibiotic selection markers have been recently developed in the multicellular model organism Caenorhabditis elegans and other related nematode species, opening great opportunities in the field of nematode transgenesis. Here we describe how these antibiotic selection systems can be easily combined with many well-established genetic approaches to study gene function, improving time- and cost-eff...

This study evaluates the effects of biotechnological procedures involved in the process of microinjection-induced transgenesis in the mouse by comparing four groups of C57BL/6 mice that differ in their transgenic background (transgenics after integration of a functional corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) gene construct, transgenics after integration of a nonfunctional CRF gene construct, nont...

This study explored the relative competitive ability and performance of first-feeding growth hormone (GH) transgenic and non-transgenic Atlantic salmon Salmo salar fry under low food conditions. Pair-wise dominance trials indicated a strong competitive advantage for residents of a contested foraging territory. Transgenic and non-transgenic individuals, however, were equally likely to be dominan...

Transgenesis is a term first coined by Gordon and Ruddle (1983) to describe a technology which allows the transfer of functioning genes between organisms, irrespective of species barriers. An organism so transformed is called transgenic. In usage, the term is employed mostly in relation to higher organisms and now commonly extends to include all plants and animals which have been genetically ma...

The need for scalable strategies to probe the biological consequences of candidate cancer genes has never been more pressing. The zebrafish, with its capacity for high-throughput transgenesis, in vivo imaging and chemical/genetic screening, has ideal features for undertaking this task. Unique biological insights from zebrafish have already led to the identification of novel oncogenic drivers an...