Using mitochondrial DNA restriction endonuclease analysis, the dynamics of the natural Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains present in spontaneous wine fermentations have been studied. We observed a sequential substitution of Sacch. cerevisiae strains along fermentation agreeing with different fermentation phases. When the restriction pattern's similarity (measured as the fraction of shared restric...

The pathogenicity of a recent isolate of Infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV), IR499, isolated from a nonvaccinated flock with 17.5 % mortality rate in susceptible SPF chickens, chickens embryos and broilers was discussed. The molecular characterization of the virus based on the restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) pattern was also investigated. The mortality rates were 85% and 22%...

Base methylation plays an important role in numerous biological functions of DNA, from inhibition of cleavage by endonucleases to inhibition of transcription factor binding. Studies of nucleic acid structure have shown little differences in unmethylated DNAs and the identical sequence containing methylated analogues. We have investigated changes in the local dynamics of DNA upon substitution of...

BalI, a type II restriction-modification (R-M) system from the bacterium, Brevibacterium albidum, recognizes the DNA sequence 5'-TGGCCA-3'. We cloned the genes encoding the BalI restriction endonuclease and methyltransferase and expressed them in Escherichia coli. The two genes were aligned tail-to-tail and their termination codons overlapped. BalI restriction endonuclease and methyltransferase...

Restriction endonucleases and other nucleic acid cleaving enzymes form a large and extremely diverse superfamily that display little sequence similarity despite retaining a common core fold responsible for cleavage. The lack of significant sequence similarity between protein families makes homology inference a challenging task and hinders new family identification with traditional sequence-base...

Esp1396I restriction-modification (RM) system recognizes an interrupted palindromic DNA sequence 5'-CCA(N)(5)TGG-3'. The Esp1396I RM system was found to reside on pEsp1396, a 5.6 kb plasmid naturally occurring in Enterobacter sp. strain RFL1396. The nucleotide sequence of the entire 5622 bp pEsp1396 plasmid was determined on both strands. Identified genes for DNA methyltransferase (esp1396IM) a...

Mitochondrial DNA from an Old World mouse, Mus musculus, and from an Old World rat, Rattus norvegicus, contain 19 and 22 distinct sites, respectively, for the 8 restriction endonucleases, BamHI, EcoRI, HaeII, HhaI, HincII, HindIII, HpaI and PstI. The relative positions of the sites have been mapped by the study of partial and double enzyme digests. Some sites may been conserverd between the mou...

The gene coding for the ethanol-inducible, developmentally regulated P450IIE1 was isolated from an lambda EMBL 3 rat genomic library and completely sequenced. The gene spanned 10,373 base pairs and contained nine exons. Upstream and downstream DNA of 1530 and 825 base pairs, respectively, was also sequenced, and the transcription start site was identified by both S1 mapping and primer extension...

We studied the relation between LTR methylation and expression of the family of endogenous retrovirus-like elements related to mouse intracisternal A-particles (IAP). Comparative HpaII/MspI and HhaI restriction analysis of genomic DNA's showed that in cells and tissues with a low level of IAP gene expression, HpaII and HhaI sites within the 5' LTR were heavily methylated, while in cells abundan...