Design and validation of a new method to detect and quantify residual host cell DNA in human recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO)

During the purification of human recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO) from host cells, residual DNA may remain in final products. This contamination is a risk factor for patients and may result in the inactivation of some tumor suppressor genes or activation of oncogenes if its concentration is more than the standard defined by WHO. Based on WHO’s criteria, acceptable level of residual DNA in biopharmaceuticals is less than 10–100?pg/dose. In this study, we have designed a sensitive and specific quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay for the detection of residual DNA in human rEPO products. All reported sequences of CHO’s GAPDH gene were retrieved from GenBank, and a multiple alignment was performed using Mega 6 software to find conserved regions of the gene. Primers and probe were designed by AlleleID7 software for the highly conserved region. Quantitative real-time PCR showed an R² value more than 0.99 and the efficiency equal to 101% indicating a highly accurate and efficiency of the reaction, respectively. Based on the standard curve, the limit of detection of the assay was determined to be 10?copies/µL (0.00967?fg/µL). In addition, the inter- and intra-assay of the test were determined to be 1.14% and 0.65%, respectively, which are in acceptable range according to the WHO’s guidelines.     

Bioactive Peptides from Sesame Meal for Broiler Chickens: Its Influence on the Serum Biochemical Metabolites,Immunity Responses and Nutrient Digestibility

International Journal of Peptide Research and Therapeutics - This study was conducted to evaluate and compare the effects of bioactive peptides derived from sesame meal (BPSM), avilamycin as an...     

Galaxy-ML: An accessible,reproducible, and scalable machine learning toolkit for biomedicine

Supervised machine learning is an essential but difficult to use approach in biomedical data analysis. The Galaxy-ML toolkit (https://galaxyproject.org/community/machine-learning/) makes supervised machine learning more accessible to biomedical scientists by enabling them to perform end-to-end reproducible machine learning analyses at large scale using only a web browser. Galaxy-ML extends Galaxy (https://galaxyproject.org), a biomedical computational workbench used by tens of thousands of scientists across the world, with a suite of tools for all aspects of supervised machine learning.

This is a PLOS Computational Biology Software paper.

     

Exogenous Methyl Jasmonate Treatment Induces Defense Response Against Fusarium culmorum in Wheat Seedlings

Journal of Plant Growth Regulation - The Fusarium crown and root rot (FCRR) pathogen Fusarium culmorum (Fc) is a hemibiotrophic pathogen, with a short biotrophic phase preceding necrotropism....