The Circle of Willis (CoW) (Figure 1) is a ring-like arterial structure located at the base of the brain. It is the major arterial anastomoses in the brain and is responsible for the distribution of oxygenated blood throughout the cerebral mass. The Internal Carotid (ICA) and Basilar (BA) arteries bring blood into the CoW and are termed afferent arteries. The Anterior (ACA), Middle (MCA), and P...

Although Cynodon dactylon (C. dactylon) is widely distributed in China, information on its genetic diversity within the germplasm pool is limited. The objective of this study was to reveal the genetic variation and relationships of 430 C. dactylon accessions collected from 22 Chinese provinces using sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP) markers. Fifteen primer pairs were used to amplif...

Wetlands provide essential functions to the ecosphere that range from water filtration to flood control. Current methods of evaluating the quality of wetlands include assessing vegetation, soil type, and period of inundation. With recent advances in molecular and bioinformatic techniques, measurement of the structure and composition of soil bacterial communities have become an alternative to tr...

For all the three methods studied in this paper, UniFrac, weighted UniFrac (W-UniFrac) and variance adjusted weighted UniFrac (VAW-UniFrac), a phylogenetic tree of the sequences from the communities is needed. Many different tree construction methods are available including maximum parsimony, distance based methods such as neighbor-joining, and maximum likelihood trees. A natural question is ho...

This study investigated the use of direct gradient analysis of bacterial 16S pyrosequencing surveys to identify relevant bacterial community signals in the midst of a "noisy" background, and to facilitate hypothesis-testing both within and beyond the realm of ecological surveys. The results, utilizing 3 different real world data sets, demonstrate the utility of adding direct gradient analysis t...

Fritillaria Linnaeus, 1753 (Liliaceae) is a genus of geophytes, represented in Greece by 29 taxa. Most of the Greek species are endemic to the country and/or threatened. Although their classical cytotaxonomic studies have already been presented, no karyomorphometric analysis has ever been given. In the present study, the cytological results of Fritillaria montana Hoppe ex W.D.J. Koch, 1832 grou...

Abstract Despite their high abundance and species richness, tilapiines have been compromised by various factors especially overfishing, climate change, uncontrolled fish transfers introductions. Fish introductions negatively impacted native tilapiine populations through competition, predation, hybridization, introgression compromising genetic integrity. The hybridization levels of different in ...