#molecular techniques

Castanea dentata

I know i’ll live to see these get bigger than 20 dbh in my lifetime and that makes me smile knowing that i’ve helped do research on these.

For any botanist out there who is trying to work on something cool, working with TACF was one of my favorite internships. I worked with the South Carolina chapter doing an internship and I think you should help while the science is good.

The accessibility of new molecular techniques, such as high-throughput sequencing, has enabled the assessment of biodiversity wherein samples are noninvasively acquired from various environments, including aquatic environments. These samples are cells released into the environment and there are many studies for estimation of biomass by using DNA extracted from these cells, called environmental DNA (eDNA), the method using eDNA reported previously had some limitations. One of the problems when studying eDNA is that different quantities of cells are released into aqueous environments from different individuals even in the same species in the same environment due to variations in size and age-class distributions8 as well as alteration in environmental factors such as water temperature and flow. We have recently developed a novel method for the reliable and simple estimation of fish populations abundance from eDNA using the haplotype count. This method, called HaCeD (Haplotype Count from eDNA)-Seq, was successfully adopted to noninvasively estimate the abundances of various eel species inhabiting the same experimental tank as well as the aquaculture pond at the same time.

Background: Reliable measurement of DNA concentration and purity is important for almost all molecular genetics studies. Different plant species have varying levels of polysaccharides, polyphenols and other secondary metabolites which combine with nucleic acids during DNA isolation and further affect the quality of the extracted DNA. The current extraction protocol is based-upon the conventional CTAB method with further modifications for the extraction of DNA from variable plant seeds and crops belong to seven different orders The principle modifications currently employed for DNA extraction involved the use of higher CTAB concentration and higher levels of β-Mercaptoethanol. Additionally, higher concentrations of sodium chloride and potassium acetate were added simultaneously with absolute ice cold isopropanol for the precipitation of DNA free from polysaccharides.  

Results and Conclusion: The prescribed modifications in the present method establish a quick and efficient standardized protocol for DNA extraction from different plant orders. The current extraction protocol, therefore, can be of great value for molecular analysis involving large numbers of different plant samples from different orders. These modifications consistently produced pure and high quality DNA suitable for further molecular analysis. Successful PCR amplification with RAPD primer, the complete digestion of the isolated DNA with the HindIII restriction enzyme and amplification of nptII gene applying both conventional and real-time PCR (RT-PCR) in presence of SYBR Green 1 dye pursued by the analysis of melting curve analysis validated the quality of the isolated DNA. Moreover, it reflects the efficiency of the protocol and proves its suitability for further applications for the assessment of food safety, detection of genetically modified (GM) crops and conservation of biodiversity.

Author(s) Details

Dr. Nadia Aboul-Ftooh Aboul-Maaty Department of Cell Biology, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Research Division, National Research Centre, Dokki, Cairo, Egypt.

Professor Hanaa Abdel-Sadek Oraby Department of Cell Biology, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Research Division, National Research Centre, Dokki, Cairo, Egypt.

Genomic Technologies in Clinical Diagnostics: Molecular Techniques

Powerful new technologies have been driving forward immense and exciting changes in clinical practice. The days of peering down the microscope to detect chromosome abnormalities are gone, replaced by chromosome analysis at the genomic level. Invasive Down syndrome tests in pregnancy have made way for the evaluation of fetal DNA in maternal blood. And instead of laborious gene-by-gene targeted…

I really dont want to write it. Its not hard im just super lazy right now. i was like ohh i'll make gif of eric nam (i never make gifs of any one/thing besides exo and I dont even have time to gif exo)