Canadian and Australian researchers were able to identify the strain of cholera bacteria responsible for the pandemic that killed millions of people in the 19th century.

Scientists have succeeded for the first time sequenced the genome of this pathogen . They were working on a well-preserved stretch of the gut of one of the victims of cholera and penetrated the secrets of bacteria that goes " killing " people today in the poorest countries on the planet . The discovery was considered significant because never before scientists were able to identify the first strains of the bacterium vibrio clolerae - pathogen that develops in the water.

The bacterium responsible for cholera was long a mystery to scientists because they failed to analyze ancient samples noted Thursday. This pathogen is "hiding" in the intestines of the victims and never reaches the bones or teeth, which means that almost no remnants of the DNA of the bacteria.

For the study, the researchers had access to a collection of human tissues that have been well preserved in the Museum of the History of Medicine in Philadelphia, founded in 1858, where a few years ago there was a cholera epidemic. DNA of bacteria was extracted from the intestine of a man who died of cholera in 1849

Scientists have been able to establish that this strain of bacteria called classic, and the second, called El Tor have coexisted in people and in the water of estuaries for many centuries, potentially even for thousands of years before the advent of pandemics in the 19th century.

The analysis helped the researchers to conclude that the first of the two types of strains was most likely responsible for five of the seven most deadly epidemics in the 19th century. Almost all hailing from the Bay of Bengal . The World Health Organisation considers that there are between 3 and 5 million new cases of cholera per year in the world , that is between 100 000 and 120 000 victims of the disease.

Cholera causes severe diarrhea leading to severe dehydration and rapid death if not treated quickly. Discovery will help scientists new methods of treatment and even prevention of the disease.

For broad cell lines, up to 100% transfection efficiency

Description
• High transfection efficiency in a broad spectrum of commonly transfected cell lines
• High performance for the delivery of plasmid DNA, siRNA, antisense oligo and miRNA
• Highest quality assured : endotoxin & sterility tests are passed.

Transfection Efficiency
• Cell Line : COS7
• DNA : pcDNA-GFP 0.4 ug/well

• Cell Line : 293A
• DNA : mCherry 20ug/Well

• Cell Line : MCF-7
• DNA : pcDNA-GFP 0.3ug/Well

Listed products
• Lipofector-Q
   - Liposomal transfection reagent
• Plusfector
   - Reagent enhances transfection mediated by cationic lipids
• Lipofector-EXT
   - Kits of Lipofector Q and Plusfector

Key Features of Lipofector and Plusfector
• Excellent transfection efficiency
   - Achieves high efficiency and expression results for plasmid or RNAi
transfections
• Wide range of successfully transfected cell lines
   - Works effectively with many cell types (adherent or suspension)
• Cost effective products

Ordering information

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For broad cell lines, lipofector-2000 or Lipofector-EZ Reagent delivers
DNA or siRNA with excellent transfection performance.

Description

•  - High transfection efficiency in a broad spectrum of commonly transfected cell lines

 - High performance for the delivery of plasmid DNA, siRNA, antisense oligo and miRNA
 - Highest quality assured : endotoxin & sterility tests are passed.

Transfection Efficiency
 - Cell Line : 293T
 - DNA : pcDNA-GFP 0.2 ug/well

 - Cell Line : MCF7
 - DNA : pcDNA-GFP 0.4 ug/well

 - Cell Line : 293T
 - RNA : 5'cap-Fluc RNA reporter 0.2 ug/well

Key Features of Lipofector 2000 and Lipofector EZ

• • Excellent transfection efficiency

  - Achieves high efficiency and expression results for plasmid or RNAi
transfections
• Wide range of successfully transfected cell lines
  - Works effectively with many cell types (adherent or suspension)
• Convenient protocol
  - Highly efficient transfection ratio in serum containing medium.
• Cost effective products

 Download Datasheet

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We have purified and characterized polyclonal dog IgE. Serum IgE was precipitated by (NH4)2SO4 and then purified by two different procedures. Ion exchange on DEAE-Sephacel, followed by HPLC using Tonen hydroxylapatite and then Protein G-Sepharose, produced a highly purified IgE fraction (No. 1) free of IgG, IgA and IgM as measured by ELISA, but recovery of IgE as measured by passive cutaneous anaphylaxis was low. Gel filtration on Sephacryl S-300, Con A-Sepharose and Protein G-Sepharose recovered 18% of initial IgE, 0.02% IgG, 0.4% IgM and 0.3% IgA. This IgE fraction (No. 2) was used to induce antibody production in rabbits. Western blot analysis was then performed for dog IgE fractions No. 1 and 2. Using the rabbit anti-dog IgE, a prominent IgE band with an apparent molecular mass of 226 kD was identified in fractions No. 1 and 2 subjected to nonreducing SDS-PAGE. This band also reacted with anti-human IgE, but not with anti-dog IgG or anti-dog IgA. Under reducing conditions the approximate molecular mass for the IgE ε chain, estimated by Western blot using rabbit anti-dog IgE, was 73 kD, providing a molecular mass of 196 kD for dog IgE.

Price: 435 euro

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The GENTAUR Bovine living cysticercosis ELISA is based on 2 mouse monoclonal antibodies that detect only protein of living Cystocerkosis infections. The ELISA can detect Cystocercosis from as low as 10 infections in one adult cattle on 500 ul of crude serum.

The results on Urine are not 100% accurate due to false positives.

Name: Bovine living cysticercosis ELISA

Product reference: 04-bov-cysto-ELISA

Price: 455 Euro / 96 wells

Use: Low detection of living infections, not quantitative but qualitative

Deze ELISA geeft een juiste diagnose in  100% van alle positieve gevallen, wanneer er meer dan 10 cysticercen aanwezig zijn in het karkas( keuringsverslag) Indien er tussen de 1 en 10 cysticercen aanwezig zijn daalt dit naar 65%. In theorie is 1 cysticerc voldoende om een mens te infecteren.

Name:  Rabbit polyclonal anti living bovine cystocercosis

Product reference: 04-bov-cysto-rab500

Price: 195 Euro / 500ul

Use: crude rabbit serum used for WB 1/500, ELISA capture antibody

Bovine cystocercosis is a parasitic disease that afflicts the muscles of cattle and is caused by larvae of the human tapewormTaenia Saginata. If people consume beef containing these parasites they can acquire intestinal tapeworm infections.

Detectietest ter confirmatie van de visuele postmortem diagnose van rundercysticercose

IWT project 080132

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs, gefitinib (Iressa) and erlotinib (Tarceva), are prescribed for lung and pancreatic cancer patients but only a few who have mutations in the EGFR gene usually benefit with a prolonged reduction of tumor size. The two drugs block the gene's ramped-up protein production, but patients' response to the drug varies widely -- from no survival benefit to several years. The average is several months.
"Clinicians have had no reliable method for distinguishing patients who are not likely to respond to EGFR inhibitors and those who will respond very well," says David Sidransky, M.D., professor of otolaryngology, oncology, pathology, urology, and genetics at Johns Hopkins. Looking at the precise level of protein production from the EGFR gene alone in specific patients was not proven to be a good indicator of patients' response to EGFR-blocking drugs, but the presence or absence of Mig 6 might be, he adds.
In a preliminary study, described July 31 in the online journal, PLoS ONE, the Johns Hopkins scientists found the genetic marker in a series of experiments that began with laboratory-derived lung and head and neck cancer cell lines resistant to EGFR-inhibitor drugs. In the cell lines, the team found very high levels of protein production from the Mig 6 gene -- up to three times the level in sensitive cell lines. Mig 6 is one of the molecules that controls the activity of the EGFR protein.
"In the first set of experiments, we found that higher levels of Mig 6 occur often in cells that don't respond to EGFR inhibitors," says Sidransky. "Most tumors are known to have high Mig 6 levels and are not expected to respond to EGFR inhibitors."
Next, the research team studied Mig 6 levels in a variety of tumors that were directly engrafted into mice, a research model known as a xenograft, and treated with an EGFR inhibitor. These new models contain a more complete sampling of the tumor that includes "stromal" cells, which surround and interact with the cancer cells. "These tumors are implanted along with their own microenvironment, into the mice, and we believe this model may be more predictive of what happens in human patients," says Sidransky.
In the xenografts of tumors without EGFR mutations, as Mig 6 levels increased, so did the resistance to EGFR inhibitors, suggesting a correlation between high Mig 6 and lack of response to the drugs. To confirm the correlation, the scientists tested tissue samples of 65 lung cancer patients treated with EGFR inhibitors to compare their Mig 6 levels with outcomes.
Of 18 patients with low Mig 6 levels, five of them survived more than a year without progression of their cancer; four survived more than two years progression-free. Among 16 patients with higher Mig 6 levels, two survived more than one year and none survived, progression-free, beyond two years.
"The beauty of this finding is that it's simple. We're looking for tumors with low levels of Mig 6 to predict clinical benefit, and there aren't many of them," says Sidransky.
Sidransky's team expects to license the Mig 6 marker to a biotechnology or pharmaceutical company and conduct further tests in larger groups of patients.

Cat Number: 9621

Quantity:10 Manifolds/Unit

More information: Sterile, individually wrapped

Description: CLP supplies an 8-port manifold which has a friction slip fit on to the 50ml combi-syringe. The tips on the manifold follow the standard 9mm center microplate spacing. With aqueous solutions this tip will provide equal dispensing across all 8 tips to within 1.7% of the dispensed volume. Because of accuracy concerns across larger diameters, CLP does not supply a twelve-port manifold.

Price: 99 Euro

Scientists have obtained the first detailed molecular structure of a member of the Tet family of enzymes.
The finding is important for the field of epigenetics because Tet enzymes chemically modify DNA, changing signposts that tell the cell's machinery "this gene is shut off" into other signs that say "ready for a change."
Tet enzymes' roles have come to light only in the last five years; they are needed for stem cells to maintain their multipotent state, and are involved in early embryonic and brain development and in cancer.
The results, which could help scientists understand how Tet enzymes are regulated and look for drugs that manipulate them, are scheduled for publication in Nature.
Researchers led by Xiaodong Cheng, PhD, determined the structure of a Tet family member from Naegleria gruberi by X-ray crystallography. The structure shows how the enzyme interacts with its target DNA, bending the double helix and flipping out the base that is to be modified.

This is the structure of the Tet enzyme with DNA. Note the purple ball at the active site, close to which one DNA base is flipped out of the double helix. Also note the degree to which the double helix is bent. Credit: Xiaodong Cheng, Emory University

"This base flipping mechanism is also used by other enzymes that modify and repair DNA, but we can see from the structure that the Tet family enzymes interact with the DNA in a distinct way," Cheng says.
Cheng is professor of biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. The first author of the paper is research associate Hideharu Hashimoto, PhD. A team led by Yu Zheng, PhD, a senior research scientist at New England Biolabs, contributed to the paper by analyzing the enzymatic activity of Tet using liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry.
Using oxygen, Tet enzymes change 5-methylcytosine into 5-hydroxymethylcytosine and other oxidized forms of methylcytosine. 5-methylcytosine (5-mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5-hmC) are both epigenetic modifications of DNA, which change how DNA is regulated without altering the letters of the genetic code itself.
5-mC is generally found on genes that are turned off or on repetitive regions of the genome. 5-mC helps shut off genes that aren't supposed to be turned on (depending on the cell type) and changes in 5-mC's distribution underpin a healthy cell's transformation into a cancer cell.
In contrast to 5-mC, 5-hmC appears to be enriched on active genes, especially in brain cells. Having a Tet enzyme form 5-hmC seems to be a way for cells to erase or at least modify the "off" signal provided by 5-mC, although the functions of 5-hmC are an active topic of investigation, Cheng says.
Alterations of the Tet enzymes have been found in forms of leukemia, so having information on the enzymes' molecular structure could help scientists design drugs that interfere with them.
N. gruberi is a single-celled organism found in soil or fresh water that can take the form of an amoeba or a flagellate; its close relative N. fowleri can cause deadly brain infections. Cheng says his team chose to study the enzyme from Naegleria because it was smaller and simpler and thus easier to crystallize than mammalian forms of the enzyme, yet still resembles mammalian forms in protein sequence.
Mammalian Tet enzymes appear to have an additional regulatory domain that the Naegleria forms do not; understanding how that domain works will be a new puzzle opened up by having the Naegleria structure, Cheng says.

A study published in Nature today describes the sugar beet reference genome sequence generated by researchers both from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and the University of Bielefeld, in cooperation with other centres and plant breeders.
Sugar beet accounts for nearly 30% of the world's annual sugar production, according to FAO, and provides a source for bioethanol and animal feed.
The sugar beet genome sequence provides insights into how the genome has been shaped by artificial selection along time.
What do foodstuff like muffins, bread or tomato sauce have in common? They all contain different amounts of white refined sugar. But, what perhaps may result amazing is that this sugar is probably sourced from a plant very similar to spinach or chard, but much sweeter: the sugar beet. In fact, this plant accounts for nearly 30% of the world's annual sugar production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations (FAO). Not in vain for the last 200 years, has it been a crop plant in cultivation all around the world because of its powerful sweetener property.
Now, a team of researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (Berlin, Germany), lead by Heinz Himmelbauer, head of the Genomics Unit at the CRG in Barcelona, together with researchers from Bielefeld and further partners from academia and the private sector, have been able to sequence and analyse for the first time the sweet genes of beetroot. The results of the study, that will be published today in Nature, shed light on how the genome has been shaped by artificial selection.
"Information held in the genome sequence will be useful for further characterization of genes involved in sugar production and identification of targets for breeding efforts. These data are key to improvements of the sugar beet crop with respect to yield and quality and towards its application as a sustainable energy crop," the authors suggest.
Sugar beet is the first representative of a group of flowering plants called Caryophyllales, comprising 11,500 species, which has its genome sequenced. This group encompasses other plants of economic importance, like spinach or quinoa, as well as plants with an interesting biology, for instance carnivorous plants or desert plants.
27,421 protein-coding genes were discovered within the genome of the beet, more than are encoded within the human genome. "Sugar beet has a lower number of genes encoding transcription factors than any flowering plant with already known genome," adds Bernd Weisshaar, a principle investigator from Bielefeld University who was involved in the study. The researchers speculate that beets may harbor so far unknown genes involved in transcriptional control, and gene interaction networks may have evolved differently in sugar beet compared to other species. The researchers also studied disease resistance genes (the equivalent to the immune system in animals) which can be identified based on protein-domains. These genes turned out as particularly plastic, with beet-specific gene family expansions and gene losses.
Many sequencing projects nowadays targeted at the analysis of novel genomes also address the description of genetic variation within the species of interest. Commonly, "this is achieved by generating sequencing reads obtained from high-throughput sequencing technologies, followed by alignment of these reads against the reference genome to identify differences," explains Heinz Himmelbauer, a principle investigator of this study.
The current work went one step further and generated genome assemblies from four additional sugar beet lines. This allowed the researchers to obtain a much better picture of intraspecific variation in sugar beet than would have been possible otherwise. In summary, 7 million variants were discovered throughout the genome. However, variation was not uniformly distributed: The authors found regions of high, but also of very low variation, "reflecting both the small population size from which the crop was established, as well as the human selection, which has shaped the plants' genomes. Additionally, gene numbers varied between different sugar beet cultivars, which contained up to 271 genes not shared with any of the other lines", as Juliane Dohm and André Minoche, two scientists involved in the study commented.
The researchers also performed an evolutionary analysis of each sugar beet gene in order to put them into context with already known genes of other plants. This analysis allowed them to identify gene families that are expanded in sugar beet compared to other plants, but also families that are absent. Notably such gene families were most commonly associated with stress response or with disease resistance, added Toni Gabaldon, group leader in the CRG Bioinformatics and Genomics programme and ICREA research professor.
Finally, the work also provides a first genome sequence of spinach, which is a close relative of sugar beet.
Thanks to the sugar beet genome sequence made by the researchers and the associated resources generated, future studies on the molecular dissection of natural and artificial selection, gene regulation and gene-environment interaction, as well as biotechnological approaches to customize the crop to different uses in the production of sugar and other natural products, are expected to be held.
"Sugar beet will be an important cornerstone of future genomic studies involving plants, due to its taxonomic position", the authors claim.

A Complete  Line for Several Applications

TRANSPLANTATION LINE

EPATITIS DELTA

MISCELLANY

ACCESSORY  KIT

MAIN FEATURES

• Kits contain all reagents necessary to carry out the test
• Internal controls to verify successful DNA extraction and amplification
• Quantitative tests: standard curve on 4 points
• High  Sensitivity and Specificity
• Small reaction volume: 5 ul
• Sample types: blood, serum and plasma, Liquor, Biopsies
• Storage temperature: +2/8°C (no  shipment in dry ice needed CE marked)
• Shelf life: 12 months
• Kits format: 25, 50, 100, 150 reactions: no waste

PROTOCOLS

Instruments protocols:

• ABI 7500 Sequence Detection System® (Software SDS version 1.3.1, Applied Biosystems™)
• Miniopticon® (Software CFX manager version 1.6, Biorad™)
• MX3000P® (Software MxPro version 4.01,  Stratagene™)

IN PROGRESS:
- CFX 96 (BioRad™)
- ROTOR-GENE Q (QIAGEN)
- SmartCycler (CEPHEID)

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More: PCR