A minimally invasive biomarker for sensitive and accurate diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.

Seeding activities of disease-associated α-synuclein aggregates (αSyn), a hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD), are detectable by seed amplification assay (αSyn-SAA) and being developed as a diagnostic biomarker for PD. Sensitive and accurate αSyn-SAA for blood or saliva would greatly facilitate PD diagnosis. This prospective diagnostic study conducted αSyn-SAA analyses on serum and saliva samples collected from patients clinically diagnosed with PD or healthy controls (HC).

A minimally Invasive Biomarker for Sensitive and Accurate Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease.

Importance: Parkinson's disease (PD), the second most common neurodegenerative disease, is pathologically characterized by intraneuronal deposition of misfolded alpha-synuclein aggregates (αSyn ). αSyn seeding activities in CSF and skin samples have shown great promise in PD diagnosis, but they require invasive procedures. Sensitive and accurate αSyn seed amplification assay (αSyn-SAA) for more accessible and minimally invasive samples (such as blood and saliva) are urgently needed for PD pathological diagnosis in routine clinical practice.

Uptake, Retention, and Excretion of Infectious Prions by Experimentally Exposed Earthworms.

Prions are proteinaceous infectious agents that can be transmitted through various components of the environment, including soil particles. We found that earthworms exposed to prion-contaminated soil can bind, retain, and excrete prions, which remain highly infectious. Our results suggest that earthworms potentially contribute to prion disease spread in the environment.

Generation of human chronic wasting disease in transgenic mice.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a cervid prion disease caused by the accumulation of an infectious misfolded conformer (PrP) of cellular prion protein (PrP). It has been spreading rapidly in North America and also found in Asia and Europe. Although bovine spongiform encephalopathy (i.

Two distinct conformers of PrP type 1 of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease with codon 129VV genotype faithfully propagate in vivo.

Current classifications of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) identify five subtypes associated with different disease phenotypes. Most of these histopathological phenotypes (histotypes) co-distribute with distinct pairings of methionine (M)/valine (V) genotypes at codon 129 of the prion protein (PrP) gene and the type (1 or 2) of the disease-associated PrP (PrP). Types 1 and 2 are defined by the molecular mass (~ 21 kDa and ~ 19 kDa, respectively) of the unglycosylated isoform of the proteinase K-resistant PrP (resPrP).

Role of prion protein glycosylation in replication of human prions by protein misfolding cyclic amplification.

Prion diseases are transmissible neurological disorders associated with the presence of abnormal, disease-related prion protein (PrP). The detection of PrP in the brain is the only definitive diagnostic evidence of prion disease and its identification in body fluids and peripheral tissues are valuable for pre-mortem diagnosis. Protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) is a technique able to detect minute amount of PrP and is based on the conversion of normal or cellular PrP (PrP) to newly formed PrP, sustained by a self-templating mechanism.

Publisher Correction: Early preclinical detection of prions in the skin of prion-infected animals.

The original version of this Article contained errors in the author affiliations. Affiliation 2 incorrectly read 'Department of Neurology, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun 130021 Jilin Province, China.'Affiliation 5 incorrectly read 'Department of Otolaryngology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710061 Shanxi Province, China'Affiliation 9 incorrectly read 'State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing 102206, China.

Early preclinical detection of prions in the skin of prion-infected animals.

A definitive pre-mortem diagnosis of prion disease depends on brain biopsy for prion detection currently and no validated alternative preclinical diagnostic tests have been reported to date. To determine the feasibility of using skin for preclinical diagnosis, here we report ultrasensitive serial protein misfolding cyclic amplification (sPMCA) and real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) assays of skin samples from hamsters and humanized transgenic mice (Tg40h) at different time points after intracerebral inoculation with 263K and sCJDMM1 prions, respectively. sPMCA detects skin PrP as early as 2 weeks post inoculation (wpi) in hamsters and 4 wpi in Tg40h mice; RT-QuIC assay reveals earliest skin prion-seeding activity at 3 wpi in hamsters and 20 wpi in Tg40h mice.

Long-term cryopreservation of non-spore-forming fungi in Microbank™ beads for plant pathological investigations.

Long-term preservation of experimental fungi without genetic, morphological, and pathogenic changes is of paramount importance in mycological and plant pathological investigations. Several cryogenic and non-cryogenic methods are available for the preservation of fungi, but the methods can be cumbersome, hazardous, expensive, and often not suitable for long-term storage of non-spore-forming (sterile) fungi. A method of preservation of spore-forming fungi in commercially available porous beads (Micrbank™) under cryogenic condition was successfully tested for three non-spore-forming basidiomycetes genera: Rhizoctonia solani (teleomorph: Thanatephorus cucumeris) (n = 19), Ceratobasidium species (n = 1), and Waitea circinata (n = 3), and a non-spore forming ascomycetes, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum (n = 1).

Protein misfolding cyclic amplification of infectious prions.

Prions are proteinaceous infectious agents responsible for the transmission of prion diseases. The lack of a procedure for cultivating prions in the laboratory has been a major limitation to the study of the unorthodox nature of this infectious agent and the molecular mechanism by which the normal prion protein (PrP(C)) is converted into the abnormal isoform (PrP(Sc)). Protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA), described in detail in this protocol, is a simple, fast and efficient methodology to mimic prion replication in the test tube.

Allelic frequencies of the 15 STR loci included in the AmpFlSTR Identifiler PCR Amplification Kit in an autochthonous sample from Spain.

The aim of this study was to estimate the allelic frequencies of the 15 STR loci included in the AmpFlSTR Identifiler PCR Amplification Kit in a sample of 342 unrelated Caucasian individuals autochthonous from Spain to be used for forensic purposes and population studies. The combined power of discrimination and the combined power of exclusion for all of the 15 loci were 5.68x10(-18) and 0.

[Affect and gender].

Unlabelled: Studies about affect and differences with regards to gender and age throw little conclusive results. There is a certain agreement on stablishing a bifactorial structure that would integrate the different dimensions of affect.

Objective: the aim is to analyze the distinguishing characteristics of affect in normal populations as a function of gender and age.

[Affect and depression in the elderly].

Depression is considered one of the most complex mental disorders in the elderly. The diagnostic difficulties due to comorbidity, especially, with somatic diseases, have cast doubt on the use of diagnostic instruments for the elderly. In the present study, we try to determine the existence of differences in affect of third-age depression with respect to adult-age depression.

The molecular diversity of different isolates of Beauveria bassiana (Bals.) Vuill. as assessed using intermicrosatellites (ISSRs).

Inter-microsatellite PCR (ISSR-PCR) markers were used to identify and to examine the genetic diversity of eleven Beauveria bassiana isolates with different geographic origins. The variability and the phylogenetic relationships between the eleven strains were analyzed using 172 ISSR-PCR markers. A high level of polymorphism (near 80%) was found using these molecular markers.

Chromosomal location of 46 new RAPD markers in rye (Secale cereale L.).

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to locate RAPD markers using disomic wheat-rye addition lines in order to develop a set of molecular markers distributed on the seven rye chromosomes. We carried out RAPD amplifications on genomic DNA of wheat 'Chinese Spring' (CS), rye 'Imperial' (I), the amphiploid wheat-rye and the seven disomic wheat-rye addition lines (1R-7R) using 140 different 10-mer oligonucleotides. Forty six new RAPD markers were located on the seven rye chromosomes and all the disomic wheat-rye addition lines were identified on the basis of their amplification patterns.