Eight paired comparisons conducted at three field sites with 1059 newly-received lightweight stocker calves were used to determine the effect of free-choice cooked molasses tubs designed for receiving cattle on 28-day receiving period performance, percentage of cattle treated for respiratory disease, and death loss. At all sites, cattle received similar management with the exception that cooked...

Lilium is an important commercial market flower bulb. qRT-PCR is an extremely important technique to track gene expression levels. The requirement of suitable reference genes for normalization has become increasingly significant and exigent. The expression of internal control genes in living organisms varies considerably under different experimental conditions. For economically important Lilium...

Food intake and obesity related phenotypes are greatly affected by economic factors and yet very little is known about the interaction of economic factors, genetics, behavior, and obesity phenotypes. Recent human population research suggests that a decreasing price of high fat food relative to low fat food has contributed to the current obesity epidemic in humans. The two key elements in this a...

BACKGROUND During March 2004, a large outbreak of legionnaires disease and Pontiac fever occurred among hotel guests in Oklahoma. An investigation was conducted to identify the source and evaluate the utility of the Legionella urine antigen assay and serologic testing for the identification of Pontiac fever. METHODS A retrospective cohort investigation of hotel guests and employees and an env...

Real-time quantitative-PCR has been a priceless tool for gene expression analyses. The reaction, however, needs proper normalization with the use of housekeeping genes (HKGs), whose expression remains stable throughout the experimental conditions. Often, the combination of several genes is required for accurate normalization. Most importantly, there are no universal HKGs which can be used since...

By using a multiply marked supernumerary chromosome III as an indicator, we isolated mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that display increased rates of chromosome loss. In addition to mutations in the tubulin-encoding TUB genes, we found mutations in the CIN1, CIN2, and CIN4 genes. These genes have been defined independently by mutations causing benomyl supersensitivity and are distinct from o...

Cryptic structure of species complexes confounds an accurate accounting of biological diversity in natural systems. Also, cryptic sibling species often become specialized to different ecological conditions, for instance, with host specialization by cryptic parasite species. The fungus Microbotryum violaceum causes anther smut disease in plants of Caryophyllaceae, and the degree of specializatio...

We computationally predict operons in the Synechococcus sp. WH8102 genome based on three types of genomic data: intergenic distances, COG gene functions and phylogenetic profiles. In the proposed method, we first estimate a log-likelihood distribution for each type of genomic data, and then fuse these distribution information by a perceptron to discriminate pairs of genes within operons (WO pai...

Gene expression analysis using reverse transcription quantitative real-time PCR (RT-qPCR) requires the use of reference gene(s) in the target species. The long yellow daylily, Hemerocallis citrina Baroni. is rich in beneficial secondary metabolites and is considered as a functional vegetable. It is widely cultivated and consumed in East Asian countries. However, reference genes for use in RT-qP...

The problem of determining the values of the independent variable given a value of the dependent variable is commonly referred to as the inverse regression problem. This problem is also encountered in real life with circular data and we refer to it in that context as the inverse circular regression problem. For such a problem, we develop distance-basedmethods, and parametric methods, where we u...