The Centre for Applied Genomics of the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto hosted the 10th Human Genome Variation (HGV) Meeting in Toronto, Canada, in October 2008, welcoming about 240 registrants from 34 countries. During the 3 days of plenary workshops, keynote address, and poster sessions, a strong cross-disciplinary trend was evident, integrating expertise from technolo...

Since 1950’s there has been a growing interest of understanding the effects of cosmic ray radiation on the increase in average global temperature. Recent studies showed that galactic cosmic rays play a significant role in the formation of low cloud coverage and its consequent impact on the global temperature variation of the earth. A long-term measurement of the cosmic ray flux distribution at ...

DNA cytosine methylation is a widespread epigenetic mechanism in eukaryotes, and plant genomes commonly are densely methylated. Genomic methylation can be associated with functional consequences such as mutational events, genomic instability or altered gene expression, but little is known on interspecific variation in global cytosine methylation in plants. In this paper, we compare global cytos...

Common, functional, germline genetic polymorphisms have been associated with clinical cancer outcomes. Little attention has been paid to the potential phenotypic consequences of germline genetic variation on downstream genes. We determined the germline status of 16 well-characterized functional polymorphisms in 126 children with newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). We assessed wh...

Methods We developed a new approach to modelling the aboveground biomass of old-growth forest (AGBmax) based on the influences of temperature on gross primary productivity (GPP) and what we call total maintenance cost (TMC), which includes autotrophic respiration as well as leaf, stem and other plant construction required to maintain biomass. We parameterized the models with measured carbon flu...

Point of Departure " First Law of Geography " : " Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. " — Waldo Tobler, 1970 Fundamental Dialectological Postulate: " Geographically proximate varieties tend to be more similar than distant ones. " — Nerbonne & Kleiweg, 2007 Tested on different types of data (surveys, corpora) Several kinds of geograph...

Using a local construction from a previous paper, we exhibit a numerical invariant, the differential Swan conductor, for an isocrystal on a variety over a perfect field of positive characteristic overconvergent along a boundary divisor; this leads to an analogous construction for certain p-adic and l-adic representations of the étale fundamental group of a variety. We then demonstrate some vari...

The earth is experiencing major changes in global and regional climates and changes are predicted to accelerate in the future. Many species will be under considerable pressure to evolve, to migrate, or be faced with extinction. Clonal plants would appear to be at a particular disadvantage due to their limited mobility and limited capacity for adaptation. However, they have outlived previous env...

We used the NASA Ocean Biogeochemical Model (NOBM) combined with remote sensing data via assimilation to evaluate the contribution of four phytoplankton groups to the total primary production. First, we assessed the contribution of each phytoplankton groups to the total primary production at a global scale for the period 1998–2011. Globally, diatoms contributed the most to the total phytoplankt...