The harmful effects of inbreeding can be reduced if deleterious recessive alleles were removed (purged) by selection against homozygotes in earlier generations. If only a few generations are involved, purging is due almost entirely to recessive alleles that reduce fitness to near zero. In this case the amount of purging and allele frequency change can be inferred approximately from pedigree dat...

Bulimia (binge-purge syndrome) is a recently described but apparently common eating disorder. Purging behaviors associated with bulimia can cause serious medical complications. Prevalence data on purging behaviors are lacking for younger adolescents. A survey was conducted with 1,728 tenth-grade students to assess their attitudes about eating, dieting, weight control, and frequency of purging. ...

Using computer simulation we explore the consequences of linkage on the inbreeding load of an equilibrium population, and on the efficiency of purging and the loss of genetic diversity after a reduction in population size. We find that linkage tends to cause increased inbreeding load due to the build up of coupling groups of (partially) recessive deleterious alleles. It also induces associative...

Phenylalanine methylester (PME), a lysosomotropic compound can be used to deplete monocytes and myeloid cells from peripheral blood and bone marrow (BM). The potential of PME for purging leukemic cells from BM was investigated using U937 and HL-60 cell lines as models. Optimal purging conditions for U937 cells were determined using an MTT assay (3-4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2, 5-diphenyl tetrazolium ...

Ex vivo processing of autologous cells for hematopoietic rescue poses numerous challenges to physicians, scientists, and technologists. These challenges include choosing the source of the graft, monitoring tumor involvement, determining whether to purge tumor cells from the graft and what purging method to use, quantitating purging efficacy, evaluating hematopoietic potential in vitro, utilizin...