Height is a model polygenic trait that is highly heritable. Genome-wide association studies have identified hundreds of single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with stature, but the role of structural variation in determining height is largely unknown. We performed a genome-wide association study of copy-number variation and stature in a clinical cohort of children who had undergone comparat...

Culture of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) under conditions promoting proliferation and differentiation, while supporting genomic and epigenetic stability, is essential for therapeutic use. We report here the extent of genome-wide DNA gains and losses and of DNA methylation instability on 170 cancer-related promoters in bone marrow (BM) MSCs during culture to late passage in medium containing fet...

The past decade has seen an explosion of articles in scientific journals involving non-genetic influences on phenotype through modulation of gene function without changes in gene sequence. The excitement in modern molecular biology surrounding the impact exerted by the environment on development of the phenotype is focused largely on mechanism and has not incorporated questions asked (and answe...

The fovea is one of the most studied retinal specializations in vertebrates, which consists of an invagination of the retinal tissue with high packing of cone photoreceptors, leading to high visual resolution. Between species, foveae differ morphologically in the depth and width of the foveal pit and the steepness of the foveal walls, which could influence visual perception. However, there is n...

Introduction In the latter half of the 20th century, the world population increased unprecedentedly in large part by the population explosion in the developing region. Such population explosion was caused by widening gap between the rapid mortality decline and the persistence of high fertility. When and how fast fertility in the developing region would decline and whether policy intervention is...

A survey of zoological literature affirmed the wide occurrence of Fibonacci numbers in the organization of acellular and prokaryotic life forms as well as in some eukaryotic protistans and in the embryonic development and adult forms of many living and fossil remains of metazoan animals. A detailed comparative analysis of the axial skeleton of a fossil fish and humans revealed a new rule of the...

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are usually the preferred strategy with which to generate evidence of comparative effectiveness, but conducting an RCT is not always feasible. Though observational studies and RCTs often provide comparable estimates, the questioning of observational analyses has recently intensified because of randomized-observational discrepancies regarding the effect of postm...

Liver cancer leads to more number of human deaths nowadays. Patient survival chances can be increased by early detection of the tumour. Texture analysis based on moment features for CT liver scan images is proposed here. The texture feature is extracted by local binary pattern and statistical features are extracted by Legendre moments. This communication presents a comparative analysis between ...

The Vertebrate Genome Annotation (Vega) database is a community resource for browsing manual annotation from a variety of vertebrate genomes of finished sequence (http://vega.sanger.ac.uk). Vega is different from other genome browsers as it has a standardised classification of genes which encompasses pseudogenes and non-coding transcripts. The data is manually curated, which is more accurate at...