WHEN OBESITY IS HARD TO FIGHT: HOMOZYGOUS POMC MUTATION IN A HISPANIC MALE

Early onset obesity and adrenal insufficiency associated with a homozygous POMC mutation

Isolated hypocortisolism due to ACTH deficiency is a rare condition that can be caused by homozygous or compound heterozygous mutations in the gene encoding proopiomelanocortin (POMC). Loss of function mutations of POMC gene typically results in adrenal insufficiency, obesity and red hair. We describe an 18 month old Hispanic female with congenital adrenal insufficiency, a novel POMC mutation a...

An effort to produce a homozygous dominant male-sterile cotton

When is Clustering Hard?

of Work in Progress PASCAL Workshop on Statistics and Optimization of Clustering, July 2005 We propose questions regarding the informational and computational limits of learning a mixture of Gaussians—the sample sizes necessary in order to recover the generating mixture with unbounded, and bounded, computation. We would like to quantify the gap between the two, i.e. the excess information requi...

Heterozygosity for a POMC-null mutation and increased obesity risk in humans.

Congenital deficiency of proopiomelanocortin (POMC) results in a syndrome of hypoadrenalism, severe obesity, and altered skin and hair pigmentation. The concept that subtle variation in POMC expression and/or function might contribute to common obesity is suggested by studies reporting linkage of obesity-related traits to a locus on chromosome 2p22 encompassing the POMC gene. We identified a no...

When Is a Network Epidemic Hard to Eliminate?

We consider the propagation of a contagion process (“epidemic”) on a network and study the problem of dynamically allocating a fixed curing budget to the nodes of the graph, at each time instant. For bounded degree graphs, we provide a lower bound on the expected time to extinction under any such dynamic allocation policy, in terms of a combinatorial quantity that we call the resistance of the ...