In the USA, cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is often sympatric with wild H. annuus, which is an agricultural weed that grows along roadsides and in other disturbed sites. We found that crop-to-wild gene flow was common (~5-40% hybrids) when wild plants occurred within <1,000 m of the crop, and crop-specific genetic markers persisted in wild populations for many generations. Crop-to-wil...

A recently introduced model describing -on a 1d latticethe velocity field of a granular fluid is discussed in detail. The dynamics of the velocity field occurs through next-neighbours inelastic collisions which conserve momentum but dissipate energy. The dynamics can be described by a stochastic equation in full phase space, or through the corresponding Master Equation for the time evolution of...

The dynamics of drinking and driving can be adequately described using the fraction of accidents involving drivers who had been drinking. Evaluating drunk driving legislation using this measure implicitly controls for unobservable “general risk” influences on traffic safety, reducing bias and variability in estimates of laws’ effects, especially in the early studies that influence lawmakers mos...

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of Porphyra purpurea, a circular-mapping genome of 36,753 bp, has been completely sequenced. A total of 57 densely packed genes has been identified, including the basic set typically found in animals and fungi, as well as seven genes characteristic of protist and plant mtDNAs and specifying ribosomal proteins and subunits of succinate:ubiquinone oxidoreductase. The...

Cyanobacteria harvest light energy through multimolecular structures, the phycobilisomes, regularly arrayed at the surface of the photosynthetic membranes. Phycobilisomes consist of a central core from which rods radiate. A large polypeptide (LCM, 75-120 kDa) is postulated to act both as terminal energy acceptor and as a linker polypeptide that stabilizes the phycobilisome architecture. We repo...

A new insertion sequence (IS1381) was identified in the genome of Streptococcus pneumoniae R6 as an 846-bp segment containing 20-bp terminal inverted repeats and flanked by 7-bp direct repeats. The three sequenced copies of this element have two overlapping open reading frame (ORF) genes named orfA and orfB. However, significant variations between individual copies were found, suggesting that i...

Differentiation of the filamentous cyanobacteria Calothrix sp strains PCC 7601 and PCC 7504 is regulated by light spectral quality. Vegetative filaments differentiate motile, gas-vacuolated hormogonia after transfer to fresh medium and incubation under red light. Hormogonia are transient and give rise to vegetative filaments, or to heterocystous filaments if fixed nitrogen is lacking. If incuba...