Three adaptive hypotheses have been proposed to explain the link between the human leucocyte antigen (hla) genes, health measures and facial attractiveness: inbreeding avoidance, heterozygote advantage and frequency-dependent selection. This paper reports findings that support a new hypothesis relating HLA to health. We suggest a new method to quantify the level of heterozygosity. HLA heterozyg...

Twenty-six primary breast tumors were examined for mutations in the p53 tumor suppressor gene by an RNase protection assay and nucleotide sequence analysis of PCR-amplified p53 complementary DNAs. Each method detected p53 mutations in the same three tumors (12%). One tumor contained two mutations in the same allele. Single strand conformation polymorphism analysis of genomic DNA and complementa...

UNLABELLED PREMISE OF THE STUDY Microsatellite primers were developed for Geranium carolinanum, a North American winter annual herb, for use in population genetic analyses. • METHODS AND RESULTS Genomic DNA enriched for repeat-containing fragments was sequenced on the Roche 454 Titanium platform, resulting in 470 primer pairs developed from 1115 microsatellite-containing sequences. A subse...

Multilocus enzyme electrophoresis data from 14 orthologous loci (25 alleles) were used to infer the genetic variation between the two Tephritidae species, Bactrocera (Dacus) cucurbitae and B. (D.) dorsalis, which are common pests of vegetables and fruits in India. Out of fourteen loci analyzed, seven loci were polymorphic in B. cucurbitae and nine loci were polymorphic in B. dorsalis. The amoun...

Microsatellite loci were identified from Cornus kousa'National'. Primer pairs for 86 loci were developed and of these, eight were optimized and screened using genomic DNA from 22 kousa cultivars. All optimized loci were polymorphic and the number of alleles per locus ranged from three to 17. Observed heterozygosity ranged from 0 to 0.3 and expected heterozygosity ranged from 0.38 to 0.91. These...

The pituitary-specific transcription factor (PIT-1) gene is a candidate gene for growth, carcass and also for milk yield traits. In dairy farm animals, the main goal of the selection is the improvement of milk yield and composition. The genes of milk proteins and hormones are excellent candidate genes for linkage analysis with quantitative trait loci (QTL) because of their biological significan...

The goal of the present study was to search for criteria that allow one to distinguish between normal individuals and heterozygotes as well as compound heterozygotes for pyruvate kinase (PK) deficiency. As the residual activity of PK with heterozygotes was between 35% and 110% of the normal activity, it was necessary to find other methods to prove heterozygosity. The PK in the hemolysates of 23...

Deletions of loci on chromosome 11p have been found frequently in several malignant tumors including gliomas, suggesting the presence of tumor suppressor genes. We analyzed 38 gliomas [26 malignant gliomas (grades III and IV) and 12 less malignant gliomas (grade I and II)] for loss of heterozygosity using microsatellite sequences on 11p as polymorphic markers. Loss of heterozygosity was found i...

Hepatoblastoma is the most common primary malignant liver tumor in children, yet little is known about molecular genetic changes in these tumors. Previous studies report loss of heterozygosity on chromosome arm 11p in some hepatoblastomas. We used the polymerase chain reaction to amplify multiple microsatellites on chromosome arm 11p to assess loss of heterozygosity in 18 hepatoblastomas. Loss ...