Rous Sarcoma virus or RSV was discovered by F. Peyton Rous in the year 1911 as a filterable transmissible agent that could cause tumors in chickens. He won a Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1966. His experiments clearly demonstrated that some cancers could be caused by infectious agents and led to the discovery of many more cancer-causing viruses in animals as well as humans.
RSV is a retrovirus that contains two copies of a plus-strand  RNA genome. Its genome consists of four main open...

Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends, or RACE, is one of the most effective methods to obtain a full-length cDNA from an mRNA sequence between a known internal region to the unknown sequence at the 5’ or 3’ end. The unknown region is cloned in the cDNA by a gene-specific primer that binds the known end, and a hybrid primer that attaches a predefined anchor sequence to the unknown end of the cDNA. The sequence in between is amplified by PCR with an anchor primer and a gene-specific...

Because the DNA segments are cut and reorganized in a direction-specific manner, site-specific recombination has emerged as an efficient genetic engineering technique. Flippase and Cyclization recombinases or Flp and Cre, respectively, are two members of the tyrosine recombinase family derived from bacteriophages, that are used to mediate site-specific DNA insertions, deletions, and targeted expression of proteins in mammalian cell lines.
The recognition sites for Cre recombinase called LoxP...

A relaxation oscillator is one of the applications of RC circuits. A neon lamp relaxation oscillator comprises a capacitor, a resistor, a voltage source, and a lamp. The lamp acts like an open circuit, with infinite resistance until the potential difference across the lamp reaches a specific voltage. At that voltage, the lamp acts like a short circuit with zero resistance, and the capacitor discharges through the lamp, thus producing light. Once the capacitor is fully discharged through the...

An RL circuit consists of a resistor and an inductor and may have a source of emf connected to it. The inductor in the circuit helps to prevent rapid changes in current, which can be helpful if a steady current is required but the external source has a fluctuating emf. Consider an open RL circuit connected to a source of constant emf. As soon as the circuit is closed, the current begins to increase at a rate that depends only on the value of the inductance in the circuit. The greater the...