Several important events occur at the maternal-fetal interface, including generation of maternal-fetal tolerance, remodeling of the uterine smooth muscle and its spiral arteries and glands, and placental construction. Fetal-derived extravillous trophoblasts come in direct contact with maternal decidual leukocytes. Macrophages represent ∼20% of the leukocytes at this interface. In this study, tw...

Anthropogenic landscape transformation has an important effect on vector-borne pathogen transmission, especially under the perspective of increase in their distribution and incidence recent decades. Drivers diseases are attributed to global change including, but not limited to, habitat alteration simplification structures such as urbanised areas, trophic interactions, introduction invasive exot...

Determining the evolutionary relationships between fossil hominid groups such as Neanderthals and modern humans has been a question of enduring interest in human evolutionary genetics. Here we present a new method for addressing whether archaic human groups contributed to the modern gene pool (called ancient admixture), using the patterns of variation in contemporary human populations. Our meth...

The demographic history of human populations in North Africa has been characterized by complex processes of admixture and isolation that have modeled its current gene pool. Diverse genetic ancestral components with different origins (autochthonous, European, Middle Eastern, and sub-Saharan) and genetic heterogeneity in the region have been described. In this complex genetic landscape, Algeria, ...

We identified and examined a candidate gene for local directional selection in Europeans, TRPV6, and conclude that selection has acted on standing genetic variation at this locus, creating parallel soft sweep events in humans. A novel modification of the extended haplotype homozygosity (EHH) test was utilized, which compares EHH for a single allele across populations, to investigate the signatu...

Biomarkers are increasingly employed in empirical studies of human populations to understand physiological processes that change with age, diseases whose onset appears linked to age, and the aging process itself. In this chapter, we describe some of the most commonly used biomarkers in population aging research, including their collection, associations with other markers, and relationships to h...

1. Stem and progenitor cells present within bone marrow give rise to colony forming units-fibroblastic (CFU-F) which can differentiate into fibroblastic, osteogenic, myogenic, adipogenic and reticular cells. The decrease in skeletal bone formation and rate of fracture repair observed with ageing and in osteoporosis has been suggested to be due to a decrease in numbers of these progenitors, but ...