Inert splint-driven oligonucleotide assembly.

In this study, we introduce a new method for oligonucleotide fragment assembly. Unlike polymerase chain assembly and ligase chain assembly that rely on short, highly purified oligonucleotides, our method, named , uses a one-tube, splint-driven assembly reaction. Splynthesis connects standard-desalted "contig" oligos (∼150 nt in length) via shorter "splint" oligos harboring 5' and 3' blocking modifications to prevent off-target ligation and amplification events.

Depression in Individuals Coinfected with HIV and HCV Is Associated with Systematic Differences in the Gut Microbiome and Metabolome.

Depression is influenced by the structure, diversity, and composition of the gut microbiome. Although depression has been described previously in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) monoinfections, and to a lesser extent in HIV-HCV coinfection, research on the interplay between depression and the gut microbiome in these disease states is limited. Here, we characterized the gut microbiome using 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of fecal samples from 373 participants who underwent a comprehensive neuropsychiatric assessment and the gut metabolome on a subset of these participants using untargeted metabolomics with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.