The loss of plant genetic resources has made necessary the development of new ex situ conservation methods. Advances in biotechnology provide new methods for plant germplasm conservation and evaluation. Biotechnological tools like in vitro culture, cryopreservation, and molecular markers offer a valuable alternative to plant diversity studies, management of genetic resources and ultimately cons...

Molecular marker-assisted selection (MAS) is currently being used to accelerate the development of rice cultivars with improved cooking quality and blast resistance at the University of Arkansas Rice Research and Extension Center (UA RREC) in Stuttgart. A co-dominant simple sequence repeat (SSR) marker, RM 190, is used to predict cooking quality of the milled grain, and a new automation-friendl...

The purpose of this mini-review is to review the current recommendations in the management of atypia of undetermined significance or follicular lesion of undetermined significance (AUS or FLUS). We will discuss the role of clinical and ultrasound which can be used to decide if a timely or aggressive intervention is necessary or not. Furthermore, we will address the clinical practice guidelines ...

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), typically measured by variation in the differences between right and left sides of bilateral traits, is commonly used to assess developmental instability (DI) in populations. A previous quantitative trait locus (QTL) investigation using an F2 intercross mouse population found little evidence of individual loci affecting FA in mandible size, but an abundance of epista...

Namibia hosts the worldwide largest free-ranging cheetah population (Marker-Kraus et al. 1996) with 95% of this population roaming outside of protected areas on commercial farmland (Morsbach 1987, Marker-Kraus & Schumann 1998). Commercial livestock farming and trophy hunting have a large economic importance in Namibia and generate substantial income (Marker-Kraus et al. 1996, Barnes et al. 2001...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. Technical aspects of agricultural biotechnology at the interface with agrobiodiversity 2.1 In vitro technologies 2.2 Genetic modification and the sourcing of genes 2.3 Molecular marker technology 2.4 Genomics and beyond 2.5 The context of agricultural biotechnology 3. Agro-biodiversity as a source for biotechnological applications 4. Biotechnological tools in genetic...

For centuries olive tree is an important crop in many Mediterranean countries because it provides appreciated oil with healthy properties. Th e lack of genomic tools, such as molecular markers or sequence information, has hindered the development of new cultivars adapted to the challenges that this species faces due to the change in modern cultivation practices, such as the increase in the numb...

It is widely accepted that semantic theories should, as far as possible, be compositional. The claim that a theory is compositional, however, lacks bite if lexical and pre-lexical items are allowed to mean diierent things in diierent contexts. The aim of the current paper is to show how two speciic phenomena can be dealt with by relying on combinatorial eeects to infer diierent consequences fro...

Background Elderly trauma now accounts for more than 20% of UK major trauma [1]. Clearly, elderly trauma patients are at increased risk of morbidity and mortality, but outcome can be difficult to predict. Current evidence is limited to correlations between poor outcome and complex, difficult-to-calculate pre-morbid frailty indices [2]. A simple, evidence-based prognostic marker is needed to gui...