Listeria monocytogenes, a gram-positive pathogen, and causative agent of listeriosis, has become a widely used model organism for intracellular infections. Recent studies have identified small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) as important factors for regulating gene expression and pathogenicity of L. monocytogenes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLittle is known about the functions of miRNAs in human longevity. Here, we present the first genome-wide miRNA study in long-lived individuals (LLI) who are considered a model for healthy aging. Using a microarray with 863 miRNAs, we compared the expression profiles obtained from blood samples of 15 centenarians and nonagenarians (mean age 96.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroRNAs (miRNAs) are increasingly envisaged as biomarkers for various tumor and non-tumor diseases. MiRNA biomarker identification is, as of now, mostly performed in a candidate approach, limiting discovery to annotated miRNAs and ignoring unknown ones with potential diagnostic value. Here, we applied high-throughput SOLiD transcriptome sequencing of miRNAs expressed in human peripheral blood of patients with lung cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe construction of synthetic biological systems involving millions of nucleotides is limited by the lack of high-quality synthetic DNA. Consequently, the field requires advances in the accuracy and scale of chemical DNA synthesis and in the processing of longer DNA assembled from short fragments. Here we describe a highly parallel and miniaturized method, called megacloning, for obtaining high-quality DNA by using next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology as a preparative tool.
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