BACKGROUND Functional dyspepsia (FD), which is a very common disorder worldwide, is known to be caused by multiple factors including environmental and genetic factors. Sasang constitutional medicine (SCM) is a component of traditional Korean medicine that emphasizes inherited characteristics of the physical and psychological patterns of a patient. This study investigated whether the prevalence ...

The discovery of the potent mutagenicity of AF-2, which was once used in Japan as a food preservative, has exerted a great influence not only on screening procedures for carcinogenic compounds but also on legislative approaches to mutagenic substances. It promoted the synthesis of exceedingly sensitive and reliable tester strains in Salmonella and supported the hypothesis of a common mechanism ...

Blood genetic and antropometric data on Melanesians from Bougainville, Papus New Guinea, are analyzed by random-effects analysis of variance to partition the observed variation into components for the individuals, village, and language group level. Both clinial and unpatterned group differences exist. The differences between language groups appear to be substantial, even when the results are co...

The human leucocyte antigen (HLA) has been documented to be involved in various disease susceptibilities or in resistance against certain diseases. An important element in susceptibility and resistance to disease is ethnic genetic constitution. Cognizant of this, the present study aimed at studying the prevalence of particular HLA class II in a normal healthy Malay population which may serve as...

Diatoms are unicellular photoautotrophic eukaryotes that play an important role in ecology by fixing large amounts of CO2 in the oceans. Because they evolved by secondary endocytobiosis--a process of uptake of a eukaryotic alga into another eukaryotic cell--they have a rather unusual cell biology and genetic constitution. Diatoms are also of biotechnological interest since they produce highly u...

The mitochondrial respiratory chain (RC) results from the expression of both mitochondrial and nuclear genes. The number of disease-causing mutations in nuclear genes is steadily growing and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) deletions and mutations account for no more than 15-20% of pediatric patients. Unfortunately, the disease-causing mutations have been identified for only a small number of patients...

A genetic approach was used to investigate whether the emergence of circadian rhythms in murine pups is dependent on a functional maternal clock. Arrhythmic females bearing either the mPer1Brdm1/Per2Brdm1 or mPer2Brdm1/Cry1-/- double-mutant genotype were crossed with wild-type males under constant darkness. The heterozygous offspring have the genetic constitution for a functional circadian cloc...

We set out to reduce the chemical constitution of a living organism to 19 amino acids. A strain was constructed for reassigning the tryptophan codon UGG to histidine and eliminating tryptophan from Escherichia coli. Histidine codons in the gene for an essential enzyme were replaced with tryptophan codons and the restoration of catalytic activity by missense suppressor His-tRNA bearing a CCA ant...

T H E relative adaptive value conferred by a particular allele depends not only on its effects in the individual of specified genetic constitution, on its frequency, its environment, and on population size, but also on interactions with other genotypes ( LEWONTIN 1955; PARSONS 1958). Increasing realization of the need to consider together all these factors has led in a number of cases to reexam...

The relation between an object and its matter is fundamental to all physical sciences, and represented widely and diversely in scientific ontologies. An under-appreciated aspect of this relation is the emergence of voids at finer levels of physical granularity. In this paper we enhance the constitution relation to account for the presence of finer voids, and show how this helps delineate two fo...