Few data are available on the molecular subtypes of all penicillin-nonsusceptible Streptococcus pneumoniae (PNSP) from a defined population base. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), serotyping, and antibiotic susceptibility testing were performed for all available invasive PNSP isolates for which the penicillin (MIC) was > or =0.1 microg/ml from Baltimore, Md., during 1995-1996 (n = 143). ...

Resource allocation to different functions is central in life-history theory. Plasticity of functional traits allows clonal plants to regulate their resource allocation to meet changing environments. In this study, biomass allocation traits of clonal plants were categorized into absolute biomass for vegetative growth vs. for reproduction, and their relative ratios based on a data set including ...

Clonal diversity in cancer has been proposed as a mechanism underlying patientto-patient variability in therapeutic response, as well as the variability in the likelihood of relapse and the time to relapse of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) as well as other cancers. As a neoplasm develops it often continues to mutate, diversifying into differing clonal populations. Darwinian evolutionary pressures...

Estimating the rate of clonal reproduction in natural population of diploid organisms is recognised as being problematic and even the detection of strictly clonal populations is often controversial. One well-acknowledged signature of clonal reproduction is the generation of non-random associations between loci. Linkage disequilibrium (LD) is thus often used for estimating the amount of clonal r...

OBJECTIVES To characterize the epidemiology of Staphylococcus aureus isolates resistant to fusidic acid isolated from patients with skin and soft tissue infections (SSTIs) in France, the UK and Ireland. METHODS One hundred and thirty-six S. aureus isolates with an MIC of fusidic acid above 1 mg/L were isolated during the EPISA study from patients more than 2 years old attending their general ...

Global changes in climate, land use, nutrient availability, acidity, populations of harvested or undesired species, and concentrations of toxins are now widely evident. Their ecological and evolutionary consequences are likely to be great but are often hard to identify or anticipate because of the multiple interactions that shape most ecological systems. One potentially important set of interac...

Inactivation of tumor suppressor genes can lead to clonal expansion. We study the evolutionary dynamics of this process and calculate the probability that inactivation of a tumor suppressor gene is preceded by mutations in genes that confer genetic instability. Unstable cells might have a slower rate of clonal expansion than stable cells because of an increased probability of generating lethal ...

Clonal plants are widespread throughout the plant kingdom and dominate in diverse habitats. Spatiotemporal heterogeneity of environment is pervasive at multiple scales, even at scales relevant to individual plants. Clonal integration refers to resource translocation and information communication among the ramets of clonal plants. Due to clonal integration, clonal plant species possess a series ...

Cancers arise from successive rounds of mutation and selection, generating clonal populations that vary in size, mutational content and drug responsiveness. Ascertaining the clonal composition of a tumor is therefore important both for prognosis and therapy. Mutation counts and frequencies resulting from next-generation sequencing (NGS) potentially reflect a tumor's clonal composition; however,...