Johns Hopkins University

University of Florida Research Foundation Inc

Lin Liu

Stuart Campbell Ray

Supriya Munshaw

Gary P Wang

Chak Kar (Eric) Li

The invention pertains to an assay that is capable of detecting a mutant polynucleotide in a plurality of polynucleotides. In one embodiment, the assay of the invention is capable of detecting one copy of a mutant polynucleotide in about 50,000 to about 100,000 copies of polynucleotides. The assay of the invention can be used to identify a mutant viral quasispecies or a mutant mRNA encoding an oncogenic protein from a tumor sample. The assay of the invention involves producing the single stranded complements of each of a plurality of polynucleotides containing the target sequence, wherein each of the single stranded complements contain a unique tag sequence and amplifying the single stranded complements by PCR using several sets of primers designed to introduce the sequences appropriate for a paired-end sequencing analysis of the amplified polynucleotides. The invention also pertains to kits for carrying out the assays of the invention.

Indexing based deep DNA sequencing to identify rare sequences

Synthetic representative HCV subtypes, including a 1a and 1b genome, dubbed Bole1a and Bole1b, are provided using an inventive method of Bayesian phylogenetic tree analysis, ancestral sequence reconstruction and covariance analysis. Bole1a branches centrally among 390 full-genome sequences used in its design, a carefully curated 143 sequence full-genome dataset, and separate genomic regions including an independent set of 214 E1E2 sequences from a Baltimore cohort. Bole1a is phylogenetically representative of widely circulating strains. Full genome non-synonymous diversity comparison and 9-mer peptide coverage analysis showed that Bole1a is able to provide more coverage (94% and 78% respectively) than any other sequence in the dataset including H77, a traditional reference sequence. Bole1a also provides unsurpassed epitope coverage when compared to all known T cell epitopes.

Synthetic hepatitis C polypeptide and methods of making and using same

Synthetic hepatitis C genome and methods of making and use

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Baltimore, MD, United States of America

Lin Liu