Clinical performance evaluation of BD SARS-CoV-2 reagents for BD MAX System in asymptomatic individuals.

Transmission by asymptomatic individuals is a persistent hurdle in the effort to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, it is essential to continue developing assays and evaluate their performance for detection of SARS-CoV-2 in individuals without COVID-19 symptoms. In this study, 223 nasopharyngeal swab specimens collected from COVID-19 asymptomatic individuals were tested using the BD SARS-CoV-2 (RT-PCR-based) reagents for the BD MAX™ System and compared with results obtained with the Biomerieux BioFire® Respiratory RT-PCR Panel.

Gross Chromosomal Rearrangements in Revealed by Illumina and Oxford Nanopore Sequencing.

() is an increasingly popular industrially relevant yeast. It is known to possess a highly efficient non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) pathway that promotes random integration of non-homologous DNA fragments into its genome. The nature of the integration events was traditionally analyzed by Southern blot hybridization.

Polar Effects of Transposon Insertion into a Minimal Bacterial Genome.

Global transposon mutagenesis is a valuable tool for identifying genes required for cell viability. Here we present a global analysis of the orientation of viable Tn-Puro (Tn-puromycin resistance) insertions into the near-minimal bacterial genome of JCVI-syn2.0.

Essential metabolism for a minimal cell.

JCVI-syn3A, a robust minimal cell with a 543 kbp genome and 493 genes, provides a versatile platform to study the basics of life. Using the vast amount of experimental information available on its precursor, , we assembled a near-complete metabolic network with 98% of enzymatic reactions supported by annotation or experiment. The model agrees well with genome-scale in vivo transposon mutagenesis experiments, showing a Matthews correlation coefficient of 0.

Tuning Gene Activity by Inducible and Targeted Regulation of Gene Expression in Minimal Bacterial Cells.

Functional genomics studies in minimal mycoplasma cells enable unobstructed access to some of the most fundamental processes in biology. Conventional transposon bombardment and gene knockout approaches often fail to reveal functions of genes that are essential for viability, where lethality precludes phenotypic characterization. Conditional inactivation of genes is effective for characterizing functions central to cell growth and division, but tools are limited for this purpose in mycoplasmas.