The southwestern and Central Asian corridor has played a pivotal role in the history of humankind, witnessing numerous waves of migration of different peoples at different times. To evaluate the effects of these population movements on the current genetic landscape of the Iranian plateau, the Indus Valley, and Central Asia, we have analyzed 910 mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) from 23 populations of...

Ossetians are a unique group in the Caucasus, in that they are the only ethnic group found on both the north and south slopes of the Caucasus, and moreover they speak an Indo-European language in contrast to their Caucasian-speaking neighbours. We analyzed mtDNA HV1 sequences, Y chromosome binary genetic markers, and Y chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) variability in three North Ossetian g...

A new gastropod fauna of Burdigalian (early Miocene) age is described from the Iranian part of Makran. The fauna comprises 19 species and represents three distinct assemblages from turbid water coral reef, shallow subtidal soft-bottom and mangrove-fringed mudflat environments in the northern Indian Ocean. Especially the reef-associated assemblage comprises largely new species. This is explained...

Background Small states, and in particular Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have been subject to academic discourses since quite a while. Briguglio (1995) diagnoses them economic vulnerability while some highlight particular advantages resulting from unique economic structures and processes (Bertram and Watters 1986; Poirine 1998). In Political Science small states have been subject of ref...

The recent description of Indonesian and Brazilian species of Acanthotetilla motivated the onset of a phylogenic and biogeographic revision of this taxon, to figure whether it had an Atlantic or an Indo-Pacific origin, and whether a Tethyan or southern African route might have been followed. A datamatrix with 27 morphological characters and 63 character states was tabulated and run on PAUP*4.0 ...

DNA topoisomerase I (TOP1) mediates the induction of radiosensitization (RS) by camptothecin derivatives in mammalian cells. Many indolocarbazole (INDO) derivatives have been shown to induce TOP1-mediated DNA damage (T1DD). In the current study, we characterized the cytotoxic and radiosensitizing activities of six INDO derivatives in relation to their efficiencies to induce T1DD. Evaluated by c...

Indo-European is the largest and best-documented language family in the world, yet the reconstruction of the Indo-European tree, first proposed in 1863, has remained controversial. Complications may include ascertainment bias when choosing the linguistic data, and disregard for the wave model of 1872 when attempting to reconstruct the tree. Essentially analogous problems were solved in evolutio...

Known as pantun to the Malays in Brunei, Malaysia, Pattani, Riau, Singapore, and Southern Phillipines, it is called peparikan to the Javanese, sesindiran to the Sundanese and many other different names in different ethnic groups in the different parts of the Indo-Malay world, which is made up of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Pattani in southern Thailand, and Mindanao in the southern P...

Species of the limpet genus Siphonaria (Gastropoda: Euthyneura) are commonly found in the rocky intertidal, worldwide, except in the Arctic. In total, 205 species-group names are available and not permanently invalid. However, estimating the actual species diversity of Siphonaria has remained challenging, mainly because past authors have interpreted differently the variation of shell characters...

BACKGROUND Anthropological studies based on highly polymorphic HLA genes provide useful information for bone marrow donor registry, forensic medicine, disease association studies, as well as designing peptide vaccines against tumors, and infectious or autoimmune diseases. OBJECTIVE This study was designed to investigate the genetic relationship of Iranian Arabs and Jews using HLA-class II gen...