A direct quantitative PCR-based measurement of herpes simplex virus susceptibility to antiviral drugs and neutralizing antibodies.

Herpes simplex viruses (HSV) are common human pathogens that can cause painful but benign manifestations and recurrent complaints, but can also cause significant morbidity and mortality on infection of the eye or brain and with disseminated infection of an immunosuppressed patient or a neonate. HSV growth inhibition measurement by plaque or yield reduction is a key task in the development of novel antiviral compounds but the manual methods are very labour intensive. The sensitive and specific PCR technology could be an effective method for quantitation of HSV DNA related to virus replication; however the currently described PCR approaches have a major limitation, namely the requirement of purification of DNA from the infected cells.

Possible contribution of epigenetic changes in the development of schizophrenia-like behavior in vasopressin-deficient Brattleboro rats.

Schizophrenia-like symptoms were detected in vasopressin-deficient (di/di) Brattleboro rats, and it was also suggested that schizophrenia might have an epigenetic component. We aimed to clarify if epigenetic changes contribute to schizophrenia-like behavior of this strain. Behavioral (locomotion by telemetry, cognition by novel object recognition, social recognition and social avoidance test, attention by pre-pulse inhibition) and epigenetic differences were compared between wild type and di/di animals.

High dynamic range detection of Chlamydia trachomatis growth by direct quantitative PCR of the infected cells.

Chlamydiae are obligate intracellular bacteria developing in an intracytoplasmic niche, the inclusion. Chlamydia growth measurement by inclusion counting is a key task in the development of novel antichlamydial antibiotics and in vaccine studies. Most of the current counting methods rely on the immunofluorescent staining of the inclusions and either manual or automatic microscopy detection and enumeration.