In the Arabidopsis inflorescence meristem (IM), auxin is considered a prepatterning signal for floral primordia, whereas a centripetal mode of positional information for floral organ identity is inherent to the ABCE model. However, spatio-temporal patterns of organ initiation in each whorl at the earliest initiation stages are largely unknown. Evidence suggests that initial flower development o...

Since its creation in 1936, the Wellcome Trust has carried out the wishes of its founder in the promotion ofresearch in medical science and in the history ofmedicine. Its achievements have been recently chronicled by A. R. Hall and B. A. Bembridge in a volume reviewed on pp. 473-475 below, and, more briefly, by Lord Franks in the following retrospect. It would be superfluous here to describe th...

Entrepreneurial ventures rely not only on founders, but also on “joiners” – startup employees who are attracted to entrepreneurship but do not want to be founders themselves. Drawing upon both individual and contextual-level perspectives of entrepreneurship, we examine how interests in being a founder or a joiner form prior to the first career transition. We find that individuals with founder a...

Paternal obesity programs metabolic syndrome in offspring. Low-impact exercise in obese  males improves the metabolic health of female offspring, however whether this occurred in male  offspring remained unknown. C57BL/6NHsd (Harlan) mice were fed a control diet (CD; 6% fat, n =  7) or a high-fat diet (HFD; 21% fat, n = 16) for 18 weeks. After 9 weeks, HFD-fed mice either remained  sedentary (H...

BACKGROUND Afrikaners are a unique ethnic group in South Africa (SA) with well-documented ancestral records spanning a period of over 350 years. They are mainly descended from Dutch, German and French settlers to SA in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today several disorders in this population occur at relatively high frequencies as a result of founder effects.Objective. To determine whether a foun...

Studies of worldwide human variation have discovered three trends in summary statistics as a function of increasing geographic distance from East Africa: a decrease in heterozygosity, an increase in linkage disequilibrium (LD), and a decrease in the slope of the ancestral allele frequency spectrum. Forward simulations of unlinked loci have shown that the decline in heterozygosity can be describ...

Germline mutations in PMS2 are associated with Lynch syndrome (LS), the most common known cause of hereditary colorectal cancer. Mutation detection in PMS2 has been difficult due to the presence of several pseudogenes, but a custom-designed long-range PCR strategy now allows adequate mutation detection. Many mutations are unique. However, some mutations are observed repeatedly across individual...

Background Causative variants in BRCA1 and BRCA2 are well-established risk factors for breast and ovarian cancer. In Poland, the causative founder variants in the BRCA1 are responsible for a significant proportion of ovarian cancer cases, however, regional differences in the frequencies of various mutations may exist. The spectrum and frequency of BRCA1/2 mutations between ovarian cancer patien...

Alex Bennet and David Bennet 1 Co-Founder, Mountain Quest Institute, Frost, West Virginia; Chair Emeritus, U.S. Federal Knowledge Management Working Group; former Chief Knowledge Officer and Deputy Chief Information Officer for Enterprise Integration of the U.S. Department of the Navy. 2 Co-Founder, Mountain Quest Institute, Frost, West Virginia; former Chairman of the Board and CEO of a profes...

For any organism, population size, and fluctuations thereof, are of primary importance in determining the forces driving its evolution. This is particularly true for viruses--rapidly evolving entities that form populations with transient and explosive expansions alternating with phases of migration, resulting in strong population bottlenecks and associated founder effects that increase genetic ...