Several Brazilian sugarcane varieties have the ability to grow with little addition of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers, showing high contributions of Biological Nitrogen Fixation (BNF). A particular type of nitrogen-fixing association has been described in this crop, where endophytic diazotrophs such as Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus and Herbaspirillum spp. colonize plant tissues without causing disease symptoms. In order to gain insight into the role played by the sugarcane in the interaction between this plant and endophytic diazotrophs, we investigated gene expression profiles of sugarcane plants colonized by G. diazotrophicus and H. rubrisubalbicans by searching the sugarcane expressed sequence tag SUCEST Database (http://sucest.lad.ic.unicamp.br/en/). We produced an inventory of sugarcane genes, candidates for exclusive or preferential expression during the nitrogen-fixing association. This data suggests that the host plant might be actively involved in the establishment of the interaction with G. diazotrophicus and H. rubrisubalbicans.

No abstract

We studied the allelic profile of CAG and CCG repeats in 61 Brazilian individuals in 21 independent families affected by Huntington's disease (HD). Thirteen individuals had two normal alleles for HD, two had one mutable normal allele and no HD phenotype, and forty-six patients carried at least one expanded CAG repeat allele. Forty-five of these individuals had one expanded allele and one individual had one mutable normal allele (27 CAG repeats) and one expanded allele (48 CAG repeats). Eleven of these forty-five subjects had a mutant allele with reduced penetrance, and thirty-four patients had a mutant allele with complete penetrance. Inter-and intragenerational investigations of CAG repeats were also performed. We found a negative correlation between the number of CAG repeats and the age of disease onset (r ¼ À0.84; Po0.001) and no correlation between the number of CCG repeats and the age of disease onset (r ¼ 0.06). We found 40 different haplotypes and the analysis showed that (CCG) 10 was linked to a CAG normal allele in 19 haplotypes and to expanded alleles in two haplotypes. We found that (CCG) 7 was linked to expanded CAG repeats in 40 haplotypes (95.24%) and (CCG) 10 was linked to expanded CAG repeats in only two haplotypes (4.76%). Therefore, (CCG) 7 was the most common allele in HD chromosomes in this Brazilian sample. It was also observed that there was a significant association of (CCG) 7 with the expanded CAG alleles (v 2 ¼ 6.97, P ¼ 0.0084). Worldwide, the most common CCG alleles have 7 or 10 repeats. In Western Europe, (CCG) 7 is the most frequent allele, similarly to our findings.

No abstract