During meiosis, paternal and maternal homologous chromosomes recombine at specific recombination sites named hotspots. What renders 2% of the mammalian genomes permissive to meiotic recombination by allowing Spo11 endonuclease to initiate double-strand breaks is largely unknown. Work in yeast has shown that chromatin accessibility seems to be important for this activity. Here, we define nucleos...

BACKGROUND 'Suicide hotspots' include tall structures (for example, bridges and cliffs), railway tracks, and isolated locations (for example, rural car parks) which offer direct means for suicide or seclusion that prevents intervention. METHODS We searched Medline for studies that could inform the following question: 'What interventions are available to reduce suicides at hotspots, and are th...

A hotspot of a moving entity is a region in which it spends a significant amount of time. Given the location of a moving object through a certain time interval, i.e. its trajectory, our goal is to find its hotspots. We consider axis-parallel square hotspots of fixed side length, which contain the longest contiguous portion of the trajectory. Gudmundsson, van Kreveld, and Staals (2013) presented...

The DNA-binding protein PRDM9 has a critical role in specifying meiotic recombination hotspots in mice and apes, but it appears to be absent from other vertebrate species, including birds. To study the evolution and determinants of recombination in species lacking the gene that encodes PRDM9, we inferred fine-scale genetic maps from population resequencing data for two bird species: the zebra f...

A major challenge in Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) is the detection of problematic communication (hotspots), as well as the classification of these hotspots into different types (root cause analysis). In this work, we focus on two classes of root cause, namely, erroneous speech recognition vs. other (e.g., dialogue strategy). Specifically, we propose an automatic algorithm for detecting hotspot...

Virtualization can provide significant benefits in data centers by enabling dynamic virtual machine resizing and migration to eliminate hotspots. We present Sandpiper, a system that automates the task of monitoring and detecting hotspots, determining a new mapping of physical to virtual resources, resizing virtual machines to their new allocations, and initiating any necessary migrations. Sandp...

Methods In this study, we used data on the dated phylogeny and geographical distribution of 1400 tree species in southern Africa to map regional hotspots of species richness (SR), phylogenetic diversity (PD), phylogenetic endemism (PE), species endemism (CWE), and evolutionary distinctiveness and global endangerment (EDGE). In addition, we evaluated the efficiency of hotspots in capturing compl...

The fully grown mammalian oocyte is transcriptionally quiescent and utilizes only transcripts synthesized and stored during early development. However, we find that an abundant RNA population is retained in the oocyte nucleus and contains specific mRNAs important for meiotic progression. Here we show that during the first meiotic division, shortly after nuclear envelope breakdown, translational...