BACKGROUND Patients with KRAS mutations do not respond to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitors and fail to benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy. Mutation analysis of KRAS is needed before starting treatment with monoclonal anti-EGFR antibodies in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). The objective of this study is to develop a multiplex allele-specific PCR (MAS-PCR) ass...

The incidence and prognostic relevance of bone marrow (BM) and leukapheresis (PBPC) tumor cell contamination (TCC) in breast cancer patients is still to be circumstantiated. We developed a new comprehensive gene expression panel to study cytokeratins (CK), maspin (MAS) and mammaglobin (MAM) as possible predictors of prognosis. Forty-eight patients undergoing high dose chemotherapy (HDCT) and PB...

The frequency of individual genetic mutations conferring drug resistance (DR) to Mycobacterium tuberculosis has not been studied previously in Central America, the place of origin of many immigrants to the United States. The current gold standard for detecting multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (DST), which is resource-intensive and slow, leading...

Background and Objectives: The incidence of rifampin-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis has attracted more attention than the tuberculosis infection due to laborious treatment and control. Recognizing the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genotypes involving in drug resistance via multiplex PCR, a simple and rapid genotyping method, is an emergency for better tre...

A multiplex allele specific polymerase chain reaction (MAS-PCR) based on the Cryptosporidium parvum dihydrofolate reductase (dhfr) gene sequence differentiates genotype 1 ('Human') from 2 ('Cattle') in a 1-step reaction. The MAS-PCR was validated on a panel of 34 microscopically positive C. parvum faecal samples of human and animal origin in comparison with 2 published PCR-restriction fragment ...

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) provides a foundation for simple sequence repeat molecular marker-assisted selection (SSR MAS) in soybean. This PCR system and its various conditions have been optimized by many researchers. However, current research on the optimization of the PCR system focuses on double-primer PCR products. We compared single- and double-SSR primer PCR products from 50 soybean ...