• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.45 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2012

Using three Austrian case studies, the variegated applications of molecular typing in today's public health laboratories are discussed to help illustrate preventive management strategies relying on DNA subtyping. DNA macrorestriction analysis by pulsed field gel electrophoresis has become the gold standard for subtyping of food borne pathogens like listeria, salmonella, campylobacter and Bacillus cereus. Using a Salmonella Mbandaka outbreak from the year 2010 as example, it is shown how the comparison of patterns from human isolates, food isolates, animal isolates and feed isolates can allow to identify and confirm a source of disease. An epidemiological connection between the simultaneous occurrence of tuberculosis in cattle and deer with cases of human tuberculosis due to Mycobacterium caprae in 2010 was excluded using mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units variable-number tandem repeats subtyping. Also in 2010, multilocus sequence typing with nonselective housekeeping genes, the so-called sequence based typing protocol, was used to elucidate connections between an environmental source (a hospital drinking water system) and a case of legionellosis. During the last decades, molecular typing has evolved to become a routine tool in the daily work of public health laboratories. The challenge is now no longer to simply type microorganisms, but to type them in a way that allows for data exchange between public health laboratories all over the world.

• Mycobiology
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.37-41
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• 2013

Laccases (EC 1.10.3.2) are copper-containing polyphenol oxidases found in white-rot fungi. Here, we report the cloning and analysis of the nucleotide sequence of a new laccase gene, fvlac7, based on the genomic sequence of Flammulina velutipes. A primer set was designed from the putative mRNA that was aligned to the genomic DNA of F. velutipes. A cDNA fragment approximately 1.6-kb long was then amplified by reverse transcriptase-PCR using total RNA, which was subsequently cloned and sequenced. The cDNA sequence of fvlac7 was then compared to that of the genomic DNA, and 16 introns were found in the genomic DNA sequence. The fvlac7 protein, which consists of 538 amino acids, showed only 42~51% identity with 12 different mushroom species containing two laccases of F. velutipes, suggesting the fvlac7 is a novel laccase gene. The first 25 amino acids of Fvlac7 correspond to a predicted signal sequence, four copper-binding sites, and four N-glycosylation sites. Fvlac7 cDNA was heterologously overexpressed in an Escherichia coli system with an approximate expected molecular weight of 60 kDa.

• Animal cells and systems
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.133-141
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• 1999

To examine the taxonomic position and affinities of Isopyrum mandshuricum (Ranunculaceae) and related taxa, genetic analysis were carried out on the basis of isozyme patterns and ITS sequences. Molecular data, both isozyme patterns and ITS sequences suggest that I. mandshuricum is closely related to Enemion raddeanum than to Semiaquilegia adoxoides. The estimation of genetic identities by isozyme analysis reveals that I. manshuricum is genetically distant from E. raddeanum. The phylogenetic tree based on molecular data is rather congruent with the phenogram based on quantitative morphological characteristics, but not consistent with one based on qualitative morphological characteristics. Incongruencies between molecular and qualitative morphological data provide clues to re-evaluate several morphological features.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.771-781
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• 2018

Staphylococcus aureus is one of the major pathogens causing bovine mastitis and foodborne diseases associated with dairy products. To determine the genetic relationships between human and bovine or bovine isolates of S. aureus, various molecular methods have been used. Previously we developed an rpoB sequence typing (RSTing) method for molecular differentiation of S. aureus isolates and identification of RpoB-related antibiotic resistance. In this study, we performed spa typing and RSTing with 84 isolates from mastitic cows (22 farms, 72 cows, and 84 udders) and developed a molecular prophage typing (mPPTing) method for molecular epidemiological analysis of bovine mastitis. To compare the results, human isolates from patients (n = 14) and GenBank (n = 166) were used for real and in silico RSTing and mPPTing, respectively. Based on the results, RST10-2 and RST4-1 were the most common rpoB sequence types (RSTs) in cows and humans, respectively, and most isolates from cows and humans clearly differed. Antibiotic resistance-related RSTs were not detected in the cow isolates. A single dominant prophage type and gradual evolution through prophage acquisition were apparent in most of the tested farms. Thus, RSTing and mPPTing are informative, simple, and economic methods for molecular epidemiological analysis of S. aureus infections.

• Plant Breeding and Biotechnology
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.269-281
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• 2017

With the continual development of genetically modified (GM) crops, it has become necessary to develop detailed and effective molecular characterization methods to select candidate events from a large pool of transformation events. Relative to traditional molecular analysis methods such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and Southern blot hybridization, next generation sequencing (NGS) technology for whole-genome sequencing of complex crop genomes had proven comparatively useful for in-depth molecular characterization. In this study, four transformation events, including one in Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)-resistant rice, one in resveratrol-producing rice, and two in beta-carotene-enhanced soybeans, were selected for molecular characterization. To merge NGS analysis and Southern blot-hybridization results, we confirmed the transgene insertion sites, insertion construction, and insertion numbers of these four transformation events. In addition, the read-coverage depth assessed by NGS analysis for inserted genes might provide consistent results in terms of inserted T-DNA numbers in case of complex insertion structures and highly duplicated donor genomes; however, PCR-based methods can produce incorrect conclusions. Our combined method provides an effective and complete analytical approach for whole-genome visual inspection of transformation events that require biosafety assessment.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.142-146
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• 2017

More effective production of human insulin is important, because insulin is the main medication that is used to treat multiple types of diabetes and because many people are suffering from diabetes. The current system of insulin production is based on recombinant DNA technology, and the expression vector is composed of a preproinsulin sequence that is a fused form of an artificial leader peptide and the native proinsulin. It has been reported that the sequence of the leader peptide affects the production of insulin. To analyze how the leader peptide affects the maturation of insulin structurally, we adapted several in silico simulations using 13 artificial proinsulin sequences. Three-dimensional structures of models were predicted and compared. Although their sequences had few differences, the predicted structures were somewhat different. The structures were refined by molecular dynamics simulation, and the energy of each model was estimated. Then, protein-protein docking between the models and trypsin was carried out to compare how efficiently the protease could access the cleavage sites of the proinsulin models. The results showed some concordance with experimental results that have been reported; so, we expect our analysis will be used to predict the optimized sequence of artificial proinsulin for more effective production.

• Korean Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.447-452
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• 2017

In this study, we tried to identify a sea anemone collected from the coast of Gijang, Busan. The anemone was morphologically similar to species belonging to the genus Anthopleura, but its morphological characteristics did not allow for confirmed identification to species level. Multiple genes from mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase III, 12S and 16S rRNA, and nuclear 18S and 28S rRNA, were amplified for multilocus sequence typing (MLST) analysis using genomic DNA extracted from the sampled anemone and a different primer set. Based on the MLST analysis, the anemone obtained in this study was identified as Anthopleura artemisia. Also, the sequence of internal transcribed spacer-2 was most closely related to A. artemisia, indicating that this single region might be useful for anemone identification. This study shows significance of molecular identification for sea anemones, and will be helpful in studies of sea anemone identification using genotyping-by-sequencing.

• Research in Plant Disease
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.194-197
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• 2016

Chinese yam necrotic mosaic virus (CYNMV) is one of the most widespread viruses in Chinese yam (Dioscorea opposita Thunb.) and causes serious yield losses. Currently, genetic information of CYNMV is very restricted and complete genome sequences of only two isolates (one from Japan and another from China) have been reported. In this study, we determined complete genome sequence of the CYNMV isolate AD collected from Andong, Korea. Genetic analysis of the polyprotein amino acid sequence revealed that the Korean isolate AD has high similarity with the Japanese isolate PES3 (97%) but relatively low similarity with the Chinese isolate FX1 (78%). Phylogenetic analysis using the CYNMV 3' proximal nucleotide sequences harboring the coat protein and 3' untranslated region further supported genetic relationship among the CYNMV isolates. Based on comparative analysis of the CYNMV genome sequences determined in this study and other previous studies, we generated molecular detection primers that are highly specific and efficient for CYNMV diagnosis.

• Journal of Veterinary Science
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.40.1-40.6
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• 2023

Analysis of the VP1 gene sequence of the foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) is critical to understanding viral evolution and disease epidemiology. A standard set of primers have been used for the detection and sequence analysis of the VP1 gene of FMDV directly from suspected clinical samples with limited success. The study validated VP1-specific degenerate primer-based reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for the qualitative detection and sequencing of serotype O FMDV lineages circulating in India. The novel degenerate primer-based RT-PCR amplifying the VP1 gene can circumvent the genetic heterogeneity observed in viruses after cell culture adaptation and facilitate precise viral gene sequence analysis from clinical samples.

• Bioinformatics and Biosystems
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.46-50
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• 2006

According to the advancement of experimental techniques in molecular biology, genomic and protein sequence databases are increasing in size exponentially, and mean sequence lengths are also increasing. Because the sizes of these databases become larger, it is difficult to search similar sequences in biological databases with significant homologies to a query sequence. In this paper, we present the N-gram indexing method to retrieve similar sequences fast, precisely and comparably. This method regards a protein sequence as a text written in language of 20 amino acid codes, adapts N-gram tokens of fixed-length as its indexing scheme for sequence strings. After such tokens are indexed for all the sequences in the database, sequences can be searched with information retrieval algorithms. Using this new method, we have developed a protein sequence search system named as ProSeS (PROtein Sequence Search). ProSeS is a protein sequence analysis system which provides overall analysis results such as similar sequences with significant homologies, predicted subcellular locations of the query sequence, and major keywords extracted from annotations of similar sequences. We show experimentally that the N-gram indexing approach saves the retrieval time significantly, and that it is as accurate as current popular search tool BLAST.