Clinico-Environmental System for Personal Monitoring.

The ever-growing use of information and communication technologies in the past decades and the proliferation of mobile devices for monitoring vital signs and physical activity is enhancing the emergence of a new healthcare paradigm. More recently, citizens are becoming more sensible to the necessity of monitoring environmental health indicators and to its direct impact on personal health. This article proposes and describes the development of a clinico-environmental system for personal monitoring.

A one-step prescreening for point mutations and large rearrangement in BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes using quantitative polymerase chain reaction and high-resolution melting curve analysis.

High-resolution melting (HRM) of DNA is a versatile method for mutation scanning that monitors the fluorescence of double-strand DNA with saturating dye. Performing HRM on a real-time thermocycler enables semiquantitative analysis (quantitative polymerase chain reaction, qPCR) to be associated to HRM analysis for detection of both large gene rearrangements and point mutations (qPCR-HRM). We evaluated this method of mutation screening for the two major breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1 and BRCA2.