Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 9, Issue 5, 2008

A technique termed Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) has emerged in 1995 and promised becoming a sort of a ‘golden bullet’ in the list of gene expression profiling methods available at the moment. Most importantly, it appeared being truly high-throughput technique, allowing gene expression profiling reaching nearly genomic scale: a success then achieved only by multi-site EST sequencing projects. More convenien Read More

A number of molecular methods of gene expression analysis can approach genomic level. Among those, Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) stands out. Unlike many other techniques, SAGE allows both qualitative and quantitative analysis of previously unknown transcripts. Over the course of the last 13 years, SAGE has became a recognized tool of large-scale gene expression profiling, being used extensively in human, ani Read More

Since Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (SAGE) was introduced more than a decade ago, it has been widely applied to characterise gene expression profiles in various tissues, cell types and cell lines of diverse origin including human, mouse, rat, yeast, plant and parasites. Throughout the past years many modifications to the original SAGE protocol have been developed, which address several aspects of SAGE, including Read More

The multiple levels of post-transcriptional processing and million-fold differences in expression levels make fully decoding the transcriptome in any given species extremely challenging. This review addresses the influence of sequenced length on transcriptome decoding under current DNA sequencing capabilities. Comparison of full-length cDNA, EST, 14-base SAGE, 21-LongSAGE, 26-SuperSAGE, and other variations shows t Read More

SuperSAGE is a variant of SAGE (Serial Analysis of Gene Expression) technology, which allows making transcript profiling by 26-bp tags extracted from cDNA employing the typeIII restriction enzyme EcoP15I. Its tag length is the longest among all the versions of SAGE, and is advantageous in tag-to-gene annotation, thereby allowing the technique to applicable to any eukaryotic life organisms. For model organisms with genom Read More

Blood cells perform many important functions within the body, including homeostasis and host defense against various invading stimuli such as viral infection, cancer and autoimmune diseases. The subsets of leukocytes interact with each other through various surface molecules such as cytokine receptors, co-stimulation molecules and adhesion molecules. Over the last several years, accumulation of cDNA and genome databases Read More

Type 2 diabetes is a multifactorial disease that is caused by the disruption of inter-organ networks. These disruptions lead to absolute and/or relative deficiencies in the actions of insulin due to either a genetic disposition or environmental factors. Specifically, the liver plays a central role in energy homeostasis and is a major source of bioactive secretory proteins that contribute to the pathophysiology of diabetes and subseq Read More

Spirulina is a photosynthetic, filamentous, spiral-shaped and multicellular edible microbe. It is the nature's richest and most complete source of nutrition. Spirulina has a unique blend of nutrients that no single source can offer. The alga contains a wide spectrum of prophylactic and therapeutic nutrients that include B-complex vitamins, minerals, proteins, γ-linolenic acid and the super anti-oxidants such as β-carotene Read More

Advances in molecular biology and biochemistry have dramatically increased our understanding of disease. The molecular mechanisms are the pathogenic basis of disease is changing modern medicine. New drugs often inhibit specific key pathways. In nuclear medicine, molecular imaging agents have been used for years, but most contrast agents for MRI or CT today are unspecific. The diagnosis is based on alterations in Read More

Advancements in single molecule detection (SMD) continue to unfold powerful ways to study the behavior of individual and complex molecular systems in real time. SMD enables the characterization of complex molecular interactions and reveals basic physical phenomena underlying chemical and biological processes. We present here a systematic study of the quenching efficiency of Forster-type energy-transfer (FRE Read More