Transgene technology provides a powerful tool for developing traits that are otherwise difficult to achieve through conventional methods. The development of transgenic plants requires the use of selectable marker genes, as the efficiency of plant transformation is less than optimal for many important species, especially for monocots such as durum wheat (Triticum turgidum var. durum). Many conce...

This paper compares the educational performance of the children of immigrants to the children in their parents’ home countries. I utilize the 2003 and 2006 PISA internationally standardized test scores for Italian, Polish, Turkish, former Yugoslavian, and former Soviet origin youth attending school in Germany, as well as youth attending school in the origin countries. Controlling for family bac...

Molecular marker-assisted selection (MAS) is currently being used to accelerate the development of rice cultivars with improved cooking quality and blast resistance at the University of Arkansas Rice Research and Extension Center (UA RREC) in Stuttgart. A co-dominant simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker, RM 190, is used to predict cooking quality of the milled grain, and a new automation-friendl...

Molecular marker-assisted selection (MAS) is currently being employed in two areas of rice breeding at the University of Arkansas Rice Research and Extension Center (RREC) in Stuttgart. Presently the objective of the program is to accelerate the development of rice cultivars with improved cooking quality and rice blast disease resistance using two well-characterized molecular markers. A co-domi...

Background The concept of Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) is rapidly evolving in animal and plant breeding. With the advent of high throughput molecular technology, numerous molecular markers distributed throughout the whole genome can be produced to characterize many genetic entries involving new perspectives in methodology of selection. An important research activity has begun in the animal w...

A major question in end-stage T cell development is how T cell receptor(TCR) ligation on immature CD4(+)CD8(+) double positive thymocytes is translated into either survival (positive selection) or apoptotic (negative selection) signals. Because different types of antigen-presenting cells (APCs) induce positive or negative selection in the thymus and express different costimulatory molecules, in...

Helper-dependent adenoviral vectors mediate high efficiency gene editing in induced pluripotent stem cells without needing a designer nuclease thereby avoiding off-target cleavage. Because of their large cloning capacity of 37 kb, helper-dependent adenoviral vectors with long homology arms are used for gene editing. However, this makes vector construction and recombinant analysis difficult. Con...

The limited repertoire of drug-resistance markers imposes a serious obstacle to genetic manipulation of Trypanosoma brucei. Here we describe experiments with a fusion protein that allows positive selection for genome integration followed by CRE recombinase-mediated excision of the marker cassette that can be selected by ganciclovir, although the excision event is so efficient that selection is ...