W ith nearly two-thirds of the population afflicted, the Nuu-chah-nulth Indians of Vancouver Island in British Columbia have one of the highest rates of arthritis in the world. Often passed down family lines, the genetics of arthritis in this unique population was studied extensively during the 1980s by Richard Ward, now head of the Institute of Biological Anthropology at the University of Oxfo...

The genus Trechosiella Jeannel, 1960 (Carabidae: Trechinae) is revised. In addition to the known species T. laetula (Péringuey, 1898), T. scotti (Jeannel, 1937), T. basilewskyi Jeannel, 1960 and T. katicola Jeannel, 1964, T. endroedyyoungai spec. nov., T. oligophthalma spec. nov. and T. scotti swartbergensis subspec. nov. are newly described. Trechosiella laetulaperingueyi (Jeannel, 1926) is re...

We introduce an approach to revealing the likelihood of different population histories that utilizes an explicit model of sequence evolution for the DNA segment under study. Based on a phylogenetic tree reconstruction method we show that a Tamura-Nei model with heterogeneous mutation rates is a fair description of the evolutionary process of the hypervariable region I of the mitochondrial DNA f...

Background and Aims: This study was the trends of Hepatitis B infection among Iranian blood donors which was analyzed in a period of 10 years. Materials and Methods: In a period of 10 years, from 2001 through 2010, a total of 16,264,830 donations from 30 regional and 35 local blood services were screened. All blood samples were tested for Hepatitis B surface antigen (HBs Ag) by commercial avail...