SummaryBackground-House screening should protect people against malaria. We assessed whether two types of house screening, full screening of windows, doors and closing eaves or installing netting ceilings in local houses, could reduce malaria vector house entry and anaemia in children, in an area of seasonal transmission.

10. In the deiayed-saccade task, the monkey was first required to fixate a central fixation spot within a

The tissue polarity mutants in Drosophila include a set of conserved gene products that appear to be involved in the control of cytoskeletal architecture. Here we show that the tissue polarity gene prickle (pk) encodes a protein with a triple LIM domain and a novel domain that is present in human, murine, and Caenorhabditis elegans homologs which we designate PET. Three transcripts have been identified, pk, pkM, and sple, encoding 93-, 100-, and 129-kD conceptual proteins, respectively. The three transcripts span 70 kb and share 6 exons that contain the conserved domains. The pk and sple transcripts are expressed with similar tissue-specific patterns but have qualitatively different activities. The phenotypes of pk mutants, and transgenic flies in which the different isoforms are overexpressed show that the balance between Pk and Sple is critical for the specification of planar polarity. In addition, these phenotypes suggest a tessellation model in which the alignment of wing hairs is dependent on cell shape and need not reflect fine-grained positional information. Lack of both pk and sple transcripts gives a phenotype affecting the whole body surface that is similar to those of dishevelled and frizzled (fz) suggesting a functional relationship between pk and fz signaling.

Background: In the pre-intervention year of a randomized controlled trial investigating the protective effects of house screening against malaria-transmitting vectors, a multi-factorial risk factor analysis study was used to identify factors that influence mosquito house entry.

BackgroundPCR inhibition by nucleic acid extracts is a well known yet poorly described phenomenon. Inhibition assessment generally depends on the assumption that inhibitors affect all PCR reactions to the same extent; i.e. that the reaction of interest and the control reaction are equally susceptible to inhibition. To test this assumption we performed inhibition assessment on DNA extracts from human urine samples, fresh urine and EDTA using different PCR reactions.ResultsWhen copurified inhibitors were assessed using two different PCR reactions one reaction appeared to be inhibited whilst the other was not. Further experiments using various concentrations of unextracted urine to inhibit six different PCR reactions revealed that susceptibility to inhibition was highly variable between reactions. Similar results were obtained using EDTA as the PCR inhibitor. We could find no obvious explanation why one reaction should be more susceptible to inhibition than another, although a possible association with amplicon GC content was noted.ConclusionThese findings have serious implications for all PCR-based gene expression studies, including the relatively new PCR array method, and for both qualitative and quantitative PCR-based molecular diagnostic assays, suggesting that careful consideration should be given to inhibition compatibility when conducting PCR analyses. We have demonstrated unequivocally that it is not safe to assume that different PCR reactions are equally susceptible to inhibition by substances co-purified in nucleic acid extracts.